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GOP lawmakers on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee opened the year in much the same way they spent the last two years: railing against telework and unions at federal agencies.
At a hearing Wednesday entitled ‘The Stay-at-Home Federal Workforce,’ Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., blamed customer service backlogs that were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as those experienced at the Social Security Administration, as the result of Biden administration officials coddling federal workers with a perk—telework—that allowed them to shirk their duties.
“When President Trump’s team enters federal agency office headquarters in and around Washington, D.C., they’ll find them to be mostly empty,” Comer said. “That’s due to the Biden administration’s failure to end pandemic-era telework and bring federal employees back to the office.”
As has been the case with other congressional Republican efforts to portray telework and remote work as antithetical to productivity, however, their rhetoric does not align with the facts. According to May 2024 data provided by the Office of Management and Budget in response to House Republicans’ demands for better data on the workplace flexibility’s deployment across government, only 54% of the federal workforce is eligible for telework, around 80% of all federal work hours are done in-person and federal workers who do engage in telework still spend 61.2% of their work hours in person, on average.
And according to the Congressional Budget Office, federal workers returned to in-person work more quickly than their counterparts in the private sector.
Social Security came in for particular scrutiny, due to then-Commissioner Martin O’Malley’s signing of an agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees to update their union contract with the agency to reflect current telework policies and effectively locking them in place as a baseline until 2029.
Comer and others argued the move unduly “hamstrings” the incoming Trump administration as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—the putative heads of the president-elect’s forthcoming government efficiency commission—have suggested canceling telework en masse to encourage federal workers to quit their jobs.
“What concessions did you extract from SSA’s union in exchange for this very generous telework entitlement?” Comer asked. “What did they agree to pay the taxpayers in return, because they work for the taxpayers, not for you.”
“They gave up $10 to $20 million in potential exposure to the agency because of between seven to nine years’ worth of grievances that were ongoing and that we were unable to resolve,” O’Malley said. “If they had gone to trial, there was a risk that the agency could have been exposed for $10 to $20 million. Before I came in, there already had been a settlement of $22 million on a similar sort of case.”
“Could that lead to more grievances filed, because they feel like they could be rewarded for filing a massive number of grievances?” Comer asked.
“Let me get to the thrust of your questions: everything I did at SSA for that urgent year that the president dispatched there was about improving customer service,” O’Malley said.
O’Malley stressed that telework has been a crucial tool for the Social Security Administration workforce, which has seen its staffing level fall to 50-year lows amid a growing population of beneficiaries due to congressional neglect in the appropriations process. In 2024, the agency saw a 6% increase in productivity under its current telework policy.
“We actually increased productivity more this year on a year-over-year basis since 2012,” he said. “With ALJ hearings where disability claimants go before a judge, before COVID that was all in person. But after COVID and the changes we had to make [to hold hearings virtually during the pandemic] we have bandwidth on dockets all over the country.”
Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wisc., asked why O’Malley had removed language allowing management to change or terminate any telework agreement for operational needs from the contract. O’Malley responded noting that SSA management may still do so, albeit only temporarily.
“So you [could] suspend the ability [to use telework], but you didn’t eliminate,“ Grothman said.
“No, we’re not going to eliminate telework. We can’t,” O’Malley said, growing animated. “Because you’ve reduced our staffing to a 50-year low at an agency where people have already paid for their customer service staffing.”
Rachel Greszler, a visiting fellow at the conservative Economic Policy Innovation Center and a former Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 contributor, described actions like the Social Security-AFGE telework contract update as an effort to “Trump-proof” agency workforces and suggested Congress should pass legislation allowing presidents to reopen collective bargaining agreements upon assuming office. And they should ban official time, the practice by which agencies agree to pay union officials their normal salary for time spent on representational duties, like in collective bargaining negotiations or representing employees during grievances or disciplinary hearings.
“Telework can be useful, but a lack of accountability contributes to abuse and could lead to blanket restrictions,” she said. “To promote more responsible and effective telework, policymakers should first maximize telework savings by getting rid of unused office space and ensuring the correct locality-based pay adjustments. Second, they should prevent collective bargaining agreements from obstructing a new president’s legal duties, including, if necessary, the Federal Service Labor Management Relations Statute. And third: don’t pay employees to work for their unions instead of the jobs they were hired to perform.”
But Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, noted that just before President Biden’s inauguration in 2021, then-acting Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli signed a contract with a union representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees giving them veto power over agency policy changes.
Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., said Greszler’s comments highlighted the true aim of the panel’s multi-year crusade against telework: downsizing the federal workforce and defanging unions.
“This hearing is not just about telework and work-from-home policies—it’s about setting the stage for dismantling the federal workforce,” she said. “It’s about the incoming administration and their desire to fire or otherwise get thousands of federal workers to leave the workforce . . . And how do we know this? Because the cochairs of [the Department of Government Efficiency] have been very open about ending telework as a way to get thousands of federal employees to leave.”
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