Remote Work for Civil Servants Faces a Challenge Under Trump

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Remote Work for Civil Servants Faces a Challenge Under Trump

When the Social Security Administration agreed to a five-year extension of work-from-home regulations for tens of thousands of employees in early December, many employees expressed relief.

But the reprieve could be short-lived. At a news conference two weeks later, President-elect Donald J. Trump railed against the deal and said he would go to court to overturn it. “If people don’t come back to work, they come back to the office,” he said, “they get laid off.”

The back-and-forth was a foretaste of what was likely one of the earliest points of contention of Mr. Trump's second administration. In recent years, many federal workers have organized their lives around hybrid arrangements that help them balance work and family responsibilities, even going so far as to demand that the Biden administration maintain the status quo. Some have rushed to join the roughly a quarter to a third of federal workers who are unionized, so telework policies will be negotiable.

But for the president-elect and his allies, the work-from-home regulations are not only a glaring example of liberal permissiveness run amok – “a gift to a union,” Trump said – but also a tempting opportunity to clarify the situation Federal government of obstructionists to destroy and significantly limit their reach.

In a Wall Street Journal column in November, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the businessmen nominated to lead Trump's Government Efficiency Commission, said they would welcome “a wave of voluntary layoffs” triggered by federal workers five Days of working from an office would take a week.

Many private sector employers have recently announced such policies, arguing that in-person work improves communication, mentorship and collaboration.

The looming clash has heightened tensions across Washington as Trump heads into his second term. A government worker involved in a union campaign to maintain work-from-home policies said union officials were concerned that press coverage of the effort, as well as the Social Security Administration, would target the agency involved would encourage the Trump administration to crack down.

“We are not ready to discuss all of this publicly,” said a representative of the union, the National Treasury Employees Union.

Mr. Trump won't be the first president to bristle at his staff's preference for working from home. The Obama administration passed a policy making it easier for federal employees to work remotely, but couldn't imagine the extent to which it would become commonplace during the pandemic. President Biden wanted to back down by 2022.

Mr. Biden announced in his State of the Union address this year that “the vast majority of federal workers will return to work in person,” and his administration issued memos laying out a new approach in 2023. Whatever the substantive merits were, it certainly wasn't the case. It was not lost on Mr. Biden that Republicans had made a political issue out of “bubble bath bureaucrats” loitering in their homes at taxpayer expense, according to a news release from Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican.

But change was slow to come. A study of federal buildings found that in 2023 they typically had less than a third of their pre-pandemic occupancy. White House Chief of Staff Jeffrey D. Zients repeatedly complained that “we have not yet reached the level of return to work that we should have done,” as he said in an April 2024 interview. About 15 to 20 percent of civilian federal employees are stationed in the Washington area.

Overall, weekly occupancy rates in Washington last year were below the average of 10 major metropolitan areas and exceeded them in New York and Chicago, among others, according to data from building security firm Kastle. (According to Kastle, average occupancy in the 10 areas is still about half of pre-pandemic levels.)

Part of the explanation may be that Washington is politically liberal, even by the standards of a major American city – Vice President Kamala Harris won more than 90 percent of the vote against Mr. Trump there in November, versus about 82 percent in Manhattan and 77 percent in Chicago . It's also a bit young. Surveys suggest that both characteristics correlate with preference for working from home.

When the president of the Brookings Institution announced in late October that the Washington-based think tank would require most employees to work at least three days a week in the office starting in March, younger employees expressed concern that the burden would fall disproportionately on them. as commuting and child care costs could eat up a larger portion of their relatively low salaries.

The consequences will be “felt differently across employees,” a researcher warned Brookings President Cecilia Rouse at a meeting with employees to discuss the change.

“We have four months,” said Dr. Rouse, a former top White House economist under Mr. Biden. “And I sincerely hope that this gives people enough time to find a way to make this work.” Dr. Rouse noted later in the meeting that employees at the conservative American Enterprise Institute were already expected to go to the office five days a week.

Age and political orientation aside, the attachment to working from home may reflect the capital's unique sociology, populated by serious grinders who are passionate about their work and, all other things being equal, would rather spend more time doing it than less.

“If I'm traveling on a mission, why would I want to waste two hours in the car?” said Kenneth Baer, ​​who was a senior official in the Office of Management and Budget under President Barack Obama.

In 2023, after the Justice Department indicated that employees would soon be required to spend an average of two to three days per week in the office (instead of just one), a group of department lawyers wrote to its leadership saying the transition was doomed to failure.

In anonymous testimonials, more than two dozen attorneys expressed enthusiasm for their work—“I love my job,” was a common sentiment—and detailed the productivity gains that telecommuting had brought with it because of long commutes and Office banter was spared.

“I can write briefs in about 60 percent of the time I could in the office,” wrote one attorney. “The first year of maximum telecommuting was one of the two most productive of my 12 years in the department – ​​even though I had two children under 4 at home and no reliable childcare.”

Several said they effectively split the work-from-home dividend between themselves and the government: They worked more but also spent more time caring for children and their mental health. The testimonials are consistent with a mid-2020 survey by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom and two colleagues that found that the typical office worker saved about 80 minutes per day when working from home, with about 40 percent of that time spent doing more work . A recent study by the Department of Labor found that industries with higher levels of remote work saw greater productivity gains.

The determination to protect these work-from-home privileges has led to a series of clashes between federal employees and their bosses in the final months of the Biden administration.

Lawyers in Justice Department divisions focused on civil rights and the environment tried to unionize last year to preserve their remote work arrangements and protect themselves if Mr. Trump follows through on his stated intention to revive an executive order that would do so It's easier to fire officials.

According to Bloomberg Law, the civil rights lawyers had to overcome resistance from their leadership, who initially argued that the department's lawyers were unable to form a union because of restrictions on workers dealing with national security matters. They voted to unionize last week.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Hundreds of Federal Trade Commission employees voted to unionize in September, in part because they hoped to protect their work-from-home policies under future administrations. But after quickly recognizing the union, the agency's chairwoman, Lina Khan, allowed months to pass before engaging with the union, according to a union source familiar with the negotiations. The source said contract negotiations only began in earnest this week under pressure from union leaders and friendly politicians.

A person briefed on Ms. Khan's thoughts said the agency only received a concrete contract proposal in mid-December and that it had to process the details as it filed cases and finalized orders before the administration ended.

Nevertheless, it is unclear to what extent the employees' initiative will help them. Mr. Trump's decision to lead the Office of Management and Budget has left allies of the new administration hoping that bureaucrats “will not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as villains” and that they will be “traumatically affected.” will be.

Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and a public service expert, said that while federal workers' efforts to maintain their working conditions through unionization and negotiating new contracts carry some weight in principle, he believes the Trump administration has done so They ignore this expectation in many cases.

“Anything that’s not enshrined in law, I think they’re going to want to challenge,” Dr. Kettl, referring to the protection of the public service. “And if it’s enshrined in the law, I think they’ll strive for it too.”