The House Oversight and Accountability Committee has pulled back the curtain on a long-suspected inefficiency in federal operations: telework run amok. A recent report highlights the staggering number of federal employees working remotely while taxpayers continue to fund billions of dollars in unused office space. Adding insult to injury, the Biden administration seems more interested in appeasing federal unions than holding workers accountable, leaving a mess for the incoming Trump administration to untangle. It’s a prime example of bureaucracy at its most wasteful and disconnected from reality.
Chairman James Comer led a hearing aptly titled “The Stay-at-Home Federal Workforce: Another Biden-Harris Legacy,” laying out the hard numbers. Of the 2.28 million federal civilian employees, roughly 228,000 never step foot in an office, and the rest barely average three in-office days per week. Certain agencies, in what can only be described as a parody of efficiency, report that their telework-eligible employees collectively spend less than half their time in the office. And then there’s the booming class of remote workers, who never have to show up at all, a group that has ballooned fivefold since 2019.
Some of the worst offenders include the Department of Health and Human Services, which saw its remote workforce skyrocket from 2% to 29%, and the Department of Education, leaping from 2% to a staggering 55%. The General Services Administration isn’t far behind, with half of its workforce now classified as remote. Meanwhile, federal agencies occupy just a fraction of their office space—some as little as 9%. Yet taxpayers are still stuck with a $7 billion annual bill for maintaining these mostly empty buildings.
If that weren’t enough, these agencies have been on a spending spree to furnish their deserted offices. Over the past few years, they’ve poured $3.3 billion into furniture and upgrades, including pricey conference room revamps for spaces that hardly see any use. Even the GSA Administrator, Robin Carnahan, has reportedly spent just one in four workdays at her D.C. office, opting to telework from Missouri instead. It’s a glaring example of leadership setting the tone for a system running on autopilot.
The Biden administration’s cozy dealings with federal unions have only compounded the problem. Long-term collective bargaining agreements have entrenched telework guarantees, tying the hands of managers and making accountability a distant dream. In April, the Office of Personnel Management introduced new rules to further protect these arrangements, effectively ensuring the next administration faces an uphill battle in reforming this bloated system. For taxpayers and the Trump administration, cleaning up this mess will be no small feat. Once again, bureaucratic inefficiency reigns supreme, and the public foots the bill.
