House Republicans Target Federal Unions After 11th-Hour Deals Tie Trump’s Hands On Remote Work

House Republicans on Wednesday said the Biden administration misled the American people about a federal workforce that has largely not shown up to the office in years, and that Donald Trump inheriting COVID-style telework was emblematic of Biden prioritizing the interests of federal unions and employees over the American people.

At the first hearing of the 119th Congress’ House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, members called for a clampdown on federal union privileges and grilled former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley for signing a contract locking in extensive telework in his last week on the job, citing a Daily Wire report that found O’Malley flew to Florida to party with union members just before signing.

“How is this good for democracy?” Chairman James Comer (R-KY) asked O’Malley. “The voters just granted Donald Trump an electoral mandate to run the executive branch. Should union contracts designed to tie his hands take precedence over the mandate by the people?”

He noted that the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which signed the contract, has called its own staff back to the office in order to more effectively fight against Trump.

“The union’s message couldn’t be clearer: For those doing the people’s business in a federal job, showing up should be optional. Those charged with blunting the Trump agenda, they need to be on their A-game, and that requires showing up in person. I, for one, want federal employees to also be on their A-game,” Comer continued.

CELEBRATE #47 WITH 47% OFF DAILYWIRE+ MEMBERSHIPS + A FREE $20 GIFT

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) added, “This was the union he was supposed to be negotiating against, not for. As Commissioner he was supposed to be serving the American taxpayers who pay his salary.”

A committee report, prepared for the hearing, noted that O’Malley stood to personally gain from the giveaway, as it could help him win his race for chair of the Democratic National Committee.

O’Malley claimed the telework agreement, which required the rate of telework to stay the same, would not stop Trump from making changes, pointing to a potential loophole. “It reads ‘management has sole discretion to temporarily change, reduce or suspend approved telework days … due to operational needs,” O’Malley said.

A witness at the hearing said that 98.5% of Social Security Administration employees are eligible for telework, leaving only 900 employees spread across 1,400 offices and servicing 73 million people. Processing time for Social Security checks is now lower than pre-pandemic levels, tracking with the increase in remote work, the report said.

Across the federal government, 10% of employees are “remote,” meaning they never have to go to an office and can live anywhere in the country, the report said. Between 2019 and 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services went from 2% remote to 29%, while the Office of Personnel Management — which itself is in charge of federal telework policies — went from 7% to 40%.

Half of all Department of Education employees never show up to work, and the remainder work from home most of the time under “telework.” Biden’s head of the General Services Administration, which manages federal buildings, herself worked from home most of the time.

When Biden took office, he issued an order requiring masks in federal offices and said federal buildings could not exceed 25% occupancy. With the virus long receded, little changed, with 17 of 24 agencies using less than a quarter of their buildings in 2023.

By the time of Biden’s 2022 State of the Union address, he was acknowledging the ill effects of telework, and said, “The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.” His chief of staff repeatedly followed up, highlighting the benefits of in-person work — but his cabinet secretaries wouldn’t listen, in part, because they were cowed by unions, the report said.

Then, despite Biden himself believing telework had gone too far, his administration worked with unions to hamstring the Trump administration on the issue, it said.

The committee said that Biden never set a government-wide policy on telework. In March 2023, then-OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said she didn’t even know what portion of the workforce was teleworking.

Agencies claim telework is necessary to retain employees, but the committee said that the government has a higher retention rate than the private sector, and that when people leave, it is usually for another government agency — meaning a government-wide policy would stop agencies from trying to poach each other’s employees by giving ever more lenient telework.

Congress also asked agencies how they were measuring whether employees were more or less efficient when working at home, and they did not have substantive answers. The Department of Justice, for example, simply said that “[s]upervisors are responsible for monitoring employee performance to ensure telework and remote work policies are being used effectively and efficiently.”

Admissions that the Biden administration was not actually tracking how telework impacted productivity undermined the White House’s contention that it was delivering “effective and efficient telework,” the report said.

Agency heads have themselves had previously blamed telework when asked to explain poor performance. NASA’s Associate Administrator for Mission Support, Robert Gibbs, said of an asteroid mission, “One of the contributing factors to poor performance on Psyche was telework.”

Social Security Administration Executive Counselor Oren “Hank” McKnelly said that due to telework, “Our front office workers, specifically the trainees that you are talking about, they did not feel connected to the mission, and they did not feel connected to the teams that they were working with.”

At the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, stakeholders complained that they showed up for meetings to find no one was there.

Other agencies attributed negative changes to factors other than telework — only to admit that they had never examined whether telework was to blame, citing the “complexity” of studying it.

When the committee asked agencies for information about how union contracts affected their ability to bring employees back, most agencies did not respond, even as some privately found unions to be damaging to their efforts. The Department of Housing and Urban Development failed to respond to Congress, even though its union filed a grievance against it for merely asking its workers to come in once a week. The Department of Education also didn’t respond to Congress, but acknowledged to the White House that union contracts were its biggest obstacle.

Hearing witness Rachel Greszler, a visiting fellow at the Economic Policy Innovation Center, said that private companies may be able to use telework effectively, but the same unions that are demanding telework also make disciplining poor performers difficult — a necessity to deal with people who aren’t independent enough to work from home.

“Telework can be very useful if it is flexible, responsive, and employees are held responsible, but that can be hard to accomplish with civil service protections and practices that make it extremely difficult, costly and time-consuming to effectively discipline or dismiss federal employees,” she said.

She said it’s so difficult to deal with low performers in government that most managers don’t even bother. In a survey, less than a third of federal employees said steps were taken to deal with poor performers who can’t or won’t improve. “Even just not giving them a performance-based bonus requires setting up a performance improvement plan,” she said.

She also targeted the policy known as “official time,” where federal employees get paid for hours spent working on union business, and the government also provides space and other resources for union use.

“That includes things like nurses at the VA spending 100% of their time working for the union instead of treating veterans, and a VA hospital allocating half of its hospital wing primarily for the union’s use,” she said. “The irony of all this official time is federal unions can’t bargain for pay or benefits, so they’re often left negotiating for things like the height of cubicle space, the right to smoke on a smoke-free campus, or the right to wear spandex to work.”

Greene, who chairs the subcommittee working with the Department of Government Efficiency, said DOGE will target official time, and noted that Biden broke with prior presidents by hiding data on its cost.

Republicans and one witness said a return to the office would help the D.C. economy — D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is aligned with Republicans on the issue — while a witness called by the Democrats said that remote work could “reverse brain drain, bring more jobs to states, and prevent economic decline in both cities and rural communities.” But those benefits would also come from relocating federal offices to other areas of the country. That wouldn’t help the D.C. area, but the D.C. suburbs are already the wealthiest areas of the country.

The committee suggested legislation that would prevent unions from being able to bargain over telework, and reopen contract negotiations at the start of each presidential term. It also said remote employees should be paid a standard rate, not paid more to live in high cost-of-living areas when they don’t go to any office.