Democratic and Republican members of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee clashed on Wednesday over whether or not current telework policies are helping Federal agencies to be more productive.
During a hearing on post-pandemic telework policies, many Republicans claimed that Federal employees are not as efficient working from their “sofas,” while Democrats argued that Federal employees are just as efficient – if not more efficient – working from home.
The hearing was the committee’s second one focused on telework policies, after committee Republicans sent letters to 25 Federal agencies in the spring to get more granular data on agency telework rates.
“Many responses were in fact, not responsive … 11 of the 25 did not include any figures at all regarding how many of their employees were currently teleworking,” said Government Operations and the Federal Workforce Subcommittee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas.
“It is very difficult for me to understand why so many of the responses we received look like nothing more than like they were simply just phoning it in,” he added. “This is a serious effort by the subcommittee.”
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, telework served as a vital tool for Federal employees to safely deliver mission-critical services.
Over the past few years, the Biden administration has expanded telework options for Federal employees, while also encouraging an increase in “meaningful” in-person work.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) removed the COVID-19 governmentwide operating status on May 15 – meaning the pandemic no longer drives how and where Federal employees work.
Nevertheless, Republicans such as Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., argued that telework is to blame for challenges to service delivery.
“You all are allowing delinquent employees to sit on their sofas at home instead of actually getting to work and doing their jobs. This is absolutely unacceptable,” Rep. Boebert said.
The congresswoman asked Hank McKnelly, executive counselor to the Social Security commissioner, why his agency continues to allow telework when its backlog for disability determinations doubled during the pandemic.
McKnelly pushed back against Rep. Boebert, arguing that his agency monitors the work employees do from home on a regular basis.
“Our employees are subject to the same performance management processes and oversight they are whether they’re teleworking or working in the office, and we have systems in place that our managers use to schedule assign and track workloads,” McKnelly said. “And that includes individual employee workloads in many cases, so real-time understanding of what actions are being processed at any particular given time.”
Additionally, he said the backlog can be attributed to a lack of funding – not from employees working from home.
“I don’t think you’re underfunded,” Rep. Boebert quipped. “You’re funded at the Nancy Pelosi levels – at the Democrat levels. We just continued that same funding.”
“We’ve had an increase of over eight million beneficiaries over the last 10 years,” McKnelly said. “At the same time, we experienced our lowest work staffing levels at the end of FY2022. That’s a math problem. If you have those workloads increasing and you don’t have the staff to take care of those workloads, you’re going to have the backlogs that you’re talking about.”
Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., also pushed back on comments made by Republican members of the subcommittee, saying that telework is “one tool in the toolbox” that can help with recruitment and retention efforts across the Federal government.
“To equate telework to laziness is both disrespectful to Federal employees who are doing their jobs every day to ensure that our citizens get what they need, and shows an inability to actually solve the real problems that our Federal agencies face,” Rep. Frost said. “There are problems, and we need to fix them, but this is not the way.”
