Last August, three and a half years after the pandemic forced millions of government workers to stay at home, President Biden's chief of staff, Jeff Zients, directed federal agencies to “aggressively implement” a return to in-person work.
In January, Zients emailed his cabinet colleagues that agencies “are not where they need to be… I ask that you redouble your leadership to increase in-person operations.”
Speaking to the Economic Club of Washington in April, Zients said, “We have not yet reached the level of return to work that we need across the federal government.”
This summer marks four and a half years since the coronavirus changed what work means and where it is for many Americans. Most people are back at work, working most of the time. But government employees still remain largely telecommuting, and a Government Accountability Office report found that 17 of 24 federal agencies were using only about a quarter of their headquarters office space last summer.
The president has urged workers to put on their shoes and return downtown, but to no avail. Taxpayers spend roughly $5 billion a year renting offices for federal employees and another $2 billion to operate those buildings and more than 500 million square feet of federally owned office space.
I figured at least one political party would portray this as pretty bad. The campaign ads about mass waste are obvious to anyone who walks around K Street NW or the Federal Triangle, past the shuttered storefronts and deserted sidewalks, especially on Mondays and Fridays, but also Tuesdays and Thursdays. Wednesdays are no good either.
Inside, hyper-efficient air conditioners pump heat into sparsely populated rooms. About half of all workers in the public and private sectors now report to offices in Washington, D.C., down slightly from pre-pandemic levels, according to card-swiping data from Kastle Systems.
The numbers are dire for the civil service alone: A Federal News Network survey this spring found that only 6% of federal employees work in an office full time, and just 30% are fully remote, with some agencies using less than 10% of their office space.
For most workers, that's fine: According to a report from the Office of Personnel Management, 84 percent of employees and managers believe staying at home will improve the quality of their work.
“While we're seeing more and more people returning to the office, it's not very practical or popular, to say the least,” said Jacqueline Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, a labor union that represents about 750,000 federal and Washington, D.C., employees. “They've worked heroically throughout the pandemic, and the idea that they have to go into the office to please Jeff Zients is absurd.”
The anger over employees' absence doesn't just extend to Zients, and appears to be at least somewhat bipartisan. If agencies don't require employees to return, they could force them to do so through legislation. That's where Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Joe Manchin III (D-WVa.) come in, with their “Back to Work Act” that would require federal employees to work in person at least 60 percent of the time.
Conservative lawmakers aren't the only ones appalled by the waste of taxpayer money. Democratic mayors have watched in horror as their tax bases collapsed and their downtowns emptied. Philadelphia Mayor Sherrell Parker (D) last month ordered all city employees to return to pre-pandemic work schedules starting in July.
In Washington, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (Democrat) called on the White House to take “decisive action” to bring federal workers back to the office or to repurpose their vast real estate holdings “to make them available to local governments, nonprofit organizations, businesses or anyone who wants to reuse the space.”
Zients said in-person work is essential to “build a strong culture,” increase productivity and train new employees.
Simon agreed that “there are benefits to doing it in person,” explaining how in-person training for younger, new employees can be effective. But she draws the line at putting the burden of expanding the tax base on workers. “Government officials have no obligation to support downtown restaurants,” she said.
In his 2022 State of the Union address, Biden promised that “the vast majority of federal employees will return to work in person.” Progress toward that goal remains slow. Any changes require negotiations with labor unions. Agencies have proposed increasing in-person work from two to four days a week, but some have reduced their proposed minimum days in response to union objections.
Management largely agrees with employees, Simon said. “They're pretty much apologizing at the negotiating table.”
The urge to stay home is powerful. After four years of stepping into work from the fridge, my work pants no longer fit. An hour-long subway ride home is far less appealing than the commute from my couch to my kitchen. And arriving at work to find the office nearly empty is deeply frustrating, negating the stimulating benefits of being with other people.
But when people share a common space, ideas flourish and serendipitous encounters produce creative work. Workers at the Department of Labor's Boston office know this instinctively. That's why, when they protested plans to force a return to the office this spring, they returned to the office, not to Zoom.
