Over at the group therapy session that is Slate magazine’s advice column, the latest liberal to lament their financial woes whines that after finally becoming a first-time homebuyer, “the absolute worst-case scenario happened.” Did Hurricane Helene wash the home away? Did the Palisades Fire burn it to the ground? Did a career criminal repeatedly released without bail by a Soros prosecutor burglarize the home in question?
Nope. Instead, like most of the country did four years ago and millions of essential workers never stopped doing, roughly 1 million federal workers have been summoned by President Donald Trump to return to the office full time. But despite the banality of Trump’s demand, federal workers have fulminated, with thousands protesting across Washington and at least 40,000 federal workers, or nearly 2% of Uncle Sam’s total workforce, accepting a stated eight months of severance payments to quit before the return-to-office deadline.
Remote or hybrid work did not begin with the coronavirus pandemic, though 2020 did expedite its ascent. And in the private sector, workplace flexibility has proven a fairly net economic good. But when it comes to federal employment, and especially those workers staffing Washington, Trump is in the right here: Hybrid work, deemed telework in government parlance, and remote work, considered working from home full time, ought to be considered the exception, not the rule.
For all the furor over Trump’s order, it doesn’t even affect the majority of the federal government’s 2.28 million employees. According to a study conducted by the Office of Management and Budget last year, 54% of federal employees worked entirely on-site. Only 10%, or 228,000, are in fully remote positions, such as the author of the Slate letter.
That leaves roughly a third of the federal workforce that was telework-eligible, or otherwise hybrid in some capacity. And those roughly 850,000 spent an average of 61.2% of their regular working hours on-site. In other words, more than half of workers are entirely unaffected by the order, and 10% of fully remote workers are entirely screwed if they indeed decamped from Washington. For the third of hybrid workers, the average employee will have to transition from working on-site three days per week to five days per week.
Especially high-skilled industries within the private sector have embraced fully remote employment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that nearly half of all employees in the finance, securities, and insurance sectors worked remotely as of 2022, while an outright majority of publishing and computer systems design workers were remote.
The share of U.S. employment spent working from home, just 6% before the pandemic, has stabilized to roughly 25% as of last year, and remote work has offered demonstrable benefits to the broader economy. The International Monetary Fund found that the expansion of remote employment increased the number of disabled people added to the workforce by at least 2 million, and remote work is perhaps the only policy intervention with a statistically significant influence on increasing our birthrate. One study found that remote or hybrid workers are 6% more likely to get married and 3% more likely to try to have children than their fully on-site counterparts.
But the public sector is a different ballgame. Whereas most private sector employees can be fired at any time and for any reason, the process for firing federal workers is intentionally onerous. Federal employees’ right to “due process” means that employers must give them a 30-day advance notice and explanation of alleged misconduct before a termination can go into effect. Federal employees then have the right to appeal the firing to an independent agency, retain independent counsel, file a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel, and then be reinstated with back pay and benefits should the appeal succeed.
And while private companies are beholden to stakeholders that incentivize them to maximize profit, resulting in persistent productivity growth only enhanced by strategically capitalizing on remote employment for higher-performing and disproportionately skilled workers, the BLS explicitly excludes the public sector from its assessment of changes to labor productivity. Private sector productivity tends to consistently outpace public sector productivity when more continuously measured in other developed countries.
The most cursory assessment of the labor productivity formula, total output divided by total input, would imply that the trajectory of government productivity is a disaster. That our annual federal deficit amounts to more than 6% of our entire GDP reflects this inefficiency.
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Over time, federal employers may be allowed to relax their standards to the prepandemic baseline to both continue to cut down on the costs of office space and permit proven employees to telework. But the primary purpose of the return-to-office order is to self-select the least motivated employees out of the federal workforce and reassert the reality that federal employees work for the taxpayers, not the other way around.
Ultimately, if it wants to reap the benefits and flexibility of private-sector employees, the public sector may need to adopt the private-sector rules of at-will employment and more transparency in productivity and performance metrics. Until then, back to the office, it is.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
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