The Department of Energy (DoE) has moved the vast majority of its workforce – 85 percent – to telework to help stem the spread of COVID-19, a DoE official confirmed to MeriTalk.
In mid-March, the agency “moved seamlessly to a maximum telework environment across our labs, sites, facilities, and Federal offices,” the DoE official said, in an email. With 85 percent of workers now teleworking, nine percent of its workforce is needed physically at DoE sites, and six percent are working in-person outside of DoE offices.
The official credited Sec. Dan Brouillette with the agency’s successful transition to remote work. The official said that over the last three years Brouillette led an effort to modernize and secure the DoE’s IT infrastructure. “This included building telework capacity by expanding our bandwidth, developing secure solutions for remote access, and developing the capability to manage our IT infrastructure from remote locations,” the official said.
The modernized infrastructure allowed the agency to “rapidly respond to maximum telework.” In mid-February, the DoE’s IT team began to “rapidly built upon this foundation by deploying additional laptops, issuing additional two-factor authentication tokens to employees for remote access, and deploying additional server capability to allow for the increased use of virtual application solutions by remote users.”
