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A US government watchdog found “rampant abuse” of work-from-home policies by federal workers, according to a report just released.
The Inspector General of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which oversees the federal workforce, found “compliance failures and weak internal oversight” as the root cause of the problem. The report focused on procedures that allowed employees to work remotely, rather than whether they were effectively performing their jobs.
The report sampled badging data, timesheet, and remote-work agreements of dozens of federal employees in 2024, during President Joe Biden’s administration, following a 2023 request from Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who took issue with remote working policies.
“Under the previous administration, OPMʼs telework and remote work policies were mismanaged and oversight was virtually nonexistent,” OPM Acting Director Chuck Ezell said in a statement.
“That era of telework abuse is over,” Ezell declared. “At President Trumpʼs direction, OPM has restored in-person operations to ensure federal employees are working for the taxpayers.”
Trump mandates return
On the first day of his second term, Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies and departments to “take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements” and require employees to return to the office on a full-time basis.
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Federal employees were required to return on March 3, meaning that the findings and recommendations of the OPM report, which aimed to develop written procedures detailing internal controls concerning remote work, are now considered closed, according to the executive summary.
OPM is the chief human resources agency and personnel policy manager for the federal government’s 2.8 million employees.
Trump has claimed that many federal workers took on second jobs while still being paid by the federal government, or were not fulfilling their duties when working remotely.
There was a dramatic increase in working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic in the first Trump administration, in keeping with the global trend.
Gaps in agreements
Based on a small sample of timesheets, the report found that 58.1% of the sampled employees failed to meet the minimum requirements for in-office work in 2024.
According to OPM’s inspector general, three in ten (29.7%) telework agreements had lapsed, 21% of those sampled had discrepancies in their paperwork, and 15% did not have any approved agreements on file.
The report did not investigate why this was the case, but suggested that possible reasons included “weak or missing management controls,” “negligence or carelessness,” and “intentional fraud or abuse.”
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Under the order signed by Trump mandating a return to in-office work, limited exemptions are allowed as determined by departmental heads. Similarly, new internal controls and compliance reviews have been set for employees who continue to work remotely.
When workers were summoned back into their offices for five days per week in March, many were met with less-than-desirable conditions, from cramped workspaces to dirty bathrooms.
In addition to the return to the office, the Trump administration also sought to cut costs by reducing space and staff.
Multiple federal employees across various agencies and departments told news outlets at the time that they found themselves working elbow-to-elbow as staff consolidated into smaller workspaces.
Understaffed cleaning crews are reportedly struggling to keep up with the demand for tidy spaces, resulting in dirty bathrooms with no paper towels.
Some staff were asked to bring their own toilet paper or help out by taking their trash home, a federal employee told USA Today.
