| What: | Telework Enhancement Act |
| When: | Extreme winter weather in February 2010 led to the passage of a bill months later, aiming to strengthen telework opportunities and guardrails. |
| Why it matters: | More than a decade later and following the COVID-19 pandemic, agencies have been constantly reassessing what their telework posture should be. Though it started as a response to extreme weather events, the 2010 Telework Enhancement Act eventually overhauled how agencies approached their long-term workforce strategies for years to come. |
Politics
A 2010 winter storm overhauled the government’s approach to telework for more than a decade
In February 2010, a “Snowmageddon” slammed the eastern United States, causing a dayslong stretch of unprecedented, blizzard-like conditions that piled up 30 inches of snow in some regions. Countless flights were canceled and roads were blocked. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the storm killed 41 people, and over 200,000 homes and businesses went without power for days.
Amid all the chaos that came from the record-breaking storm, the 2010 Snowmageddon spurred further conversations in Congress about the need to use all means necessary to keep federal agencies up and running, even in the worst scenarios possible.
Lawmakers had already been working for a few years on legislation to expand the use of telework in the federal government. Many argued that expanding telework for federal employees would ensure they could maintain critical services to the public, regardless of external conditions.
But it wasn’t until 2010 — spurred by the major snowstorm — that a bipartisan bill called the Telework Enhancement Act began gaining more attention.
“[Snowmageddon] really pushed this issue of, what do you do to maintain continuity of operations, particularly for critical agencies, when people can’t get to their normal workplace?” said former Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Va.), an original co-sponsor on the 2010 bill. “That theme, the continuity of operations, was helping to, I think, deepen the interest on the part of legislators in telework.”
The challenges agencies faced during Snowmageddon made it clear there was a need to have baseline telework policy to ensure agencies’ continuity of operations. If there were regional shutdowns of federal buildings, for instance, agencies had to find a way to continue working — and in many cases, lawmakers said that necessitated telework.
The late Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio), a co-sponsor of the bill, argued back in 2010 that “advancements in technology mean employees will expect to be able to work at any time from any place, as evidenced by the thousands of federal employees who worked from home during last winter’s snowstorms in Washington, D.C. This bill will expand telework programs for federal employees and ensure the government keeps running during weather events or emergencies.”
It took most of the year to move the legislation through Congress, but by December 2010, lawmakers had reached an agreement on the Telework Enhancement Act. The bill intended to broaden the use, define the guardrails and measure the impacts of telework across the federal government. President Barack Obama signed the bill into law on Dec. 9.
The Telework Enhancement Act specifically required the Office of Personnel Management to create governmentwide telework guidance. OPM then tasked agencies with developing their own internal policies for teleworking employees — figuring out who was eligible for it, and what frequency of telework made sense. Each agency also had to designate a telework managing officer and offer telework training to staff members.
As a result of the legislation, OPM began compiling governmentwide data on telework, covering how much employees were using the flexibility, and what its impacts were not only on continuity of operations, but also productivity, cost savings, workforce retention and more.
Proponents saw telework in government as more than just a perk for federal employees. It was a way to ensure critical services continue to be delivered, generate cost savings on federal office space, improve employee recruitment and retention in competition with the private sector, and add more efficiencies to agency workflows.
“It was about realizing that there’s a strong and durable hybrid model that you can build. That means you’re maximizing what it looks like to be on-site, in the office, in the traditional workplace on the one hand — but at the same time, allowing telework and remote work to bring the productivity opportunity that it represents into the equation,” Sarbanes said. “There was a sense that we could find a new kind of diversified, hybrid workplace, that would contribute to productivity.”
Early challenges, opportunities
After a few years, the effects of the Telework Enhancement Act appeared promising. In 2013, the Government Accountability Office reported that following the 2010 law’s requirements, the expanded availability of telework was helping agencies recruit and retain employees, as well as save on real estate costs and reduce energy consumption.
And in a 2015 report to Congress, then-acting OPM Director Beth Cobert said agencies were continuing to make “enormous” progress in their implementation of the telework legislation.
“Agencies have not only met basic statutory requirements, but have also taken steps to strategically leverage telework in support of critical goals,” Cobert said. “There is mounting and encouraging evidence to suggest that the vision that drove the act is increasingly becoming reality.”
Of course, there were barriers and challenges to the law’s implementation as well. Agencies expressed concerns about IT-related costs of telework, such as purchasing laptops for at-home work. Some agencies worried about telework options raising issues of perceived fairness between employees. Others reported difficulties with managers who were resistant to increases in telework for their employees.
Agencies at the time were also struggling to measure the effects of telework, GAO said. There were some gaps in the data, stemming in part from agencies’ lack of experience measuring the impacts of telework.
“That, plus a lack of baseline data, may be dissuading agencies from focusing attention on telework goals,” GAO wrote in 2015.
Following those early challenges, however, GAO ultimately closed its recommendations to OPM on improving data collection, confirming that the changes had been implemented.
Still, in the years to follow, data on telework and remote work would become a central point of the rising disagreements over the future of the federal workplace.
Telework law collides with COVID-19
While initially a response to extreme weather events, the 2010 Telework Enhancement Act also prepared agencies to continue services during a much different and unprecedented type of disaster: the COVID-19 pandemic.
By the height of pandemic, agencies had already spent years developing and fine-tuning their telework and remote work policies. They had ironed out a lot of the early wrinkles following the 2010 legislation, while working to improve their collection of telework data.
So in March 2020, when the White House asked agencies to move to a maximum telework posture, many were able to do just that.
“It just stands to reason that if you had invited or required agencies to be more intentional about telework and think about how to design it inside their own structures — that exploration in and of itself, combined with actual practice for a number of years, would position the agency more strongly to respond in the pandemic moment,” Sarbanes said.
But the ability to pivot to a maximum telework posture also largely depended on the agency. Agencies who had leaned more into telework in the years leading up were more effective, while agencies who had been slower to incorporate telework struggled more.
“For agencies who didn’t have a tremendous population of workers who were set up to telework, who maybe hadn’t invested in laptops, that certainly became a real challenge,” Jackie Maffucci, former OPM deputy director for congressional, legislative and intergovernmental affairs, said in an interview. “Agencies really had to overcome that — as well as this idea of turning what was a volunteer program now into almost a mandate for individuals who were required to work from home because of the emergency.”
Later on, telework data also showed agencies increased their flexibilities during the pandemic, as the total number of telework-eligible feds gradually increased. During COVID-19, the federal workforce crossed a threshold, with just over half of employees becoming telework-eligible governmentwide.
That meant even at the height of the pandemic, about half of the entire federal workforce was working entirely on-site given the public-facing nature of their jobs. But the maximum telework posture during 2020 still created rippling consequences for the federal workforce for years to come.
Post-pandemic transformation
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed plenty of lessons learned about the future of work, but also left many questions about how agency telework policies would emerge on the other side of the national emergency.
In 2021, the Biden administration’s OPM issued new telework guidance, outlining a future of work that hinged on “hybrid work.” The guidance encouraged agencies to more deeply incorporate telework and remote work into their long-term workforce plans. At the time, OPM said integrating telework for the long run would help improve recruitment, retention and cost savings.
“The COVID-19 pandemic forced changes to the workplace. Many employees learned how to perform the functions of their job in a new way during a difficult time, meeting the challenges head-on. Agencies demonstrated that they have been able to carry out their missions effectively,” OPM wrote in the 2021 guidance. “Accordingly, agencies now have an opportunity to revisit how they were operating prior to the pandemic and leverage lessons learned during the pandemic to integrate telework and remote work into their strategic workforce plans.”
Despite agencies still being able to function throughout the height of COVID-19, the pandemic revealed some challenges in federal telework policies as well. And those challenges unearthed a deep divide in how the future of work should be approached in government.
Some lawmakers, for instance, saw those gaps as an opportunity to build further on telework requirements governmentwide. The 2022 Telework Metrics and Cost Savings Act, a bill introduced by Sarbanes and the late Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), sought to create stricter data collection and reporting requirements for agencies with teleworking employees. Ultimately, however, Congress failed to pass the bill.
At the same time, many Republicans began blaming the use of telework during the pandemic for lagging services to the public and growing backlogs. Congressional GOP members introduced various bills attempting in one way or another to return the federal workforce to pre-pandemic levels of telework.
As agencies began slowly returning their employees on-site, Republicans’ arguments against telework intensified. The House Oversight and Accountability Committee held multiple hearings in the early years post-pandemic to question federal officials on the use of telework across government.
During a March 2023 hearing, committee Republicans questioned then-OPM Director Kiran Ahuja on what they saw as an inability to provide specific data on telework levels across government. They brought up what would become familiar arguments against federal telework, and pushed for a full return to the office.
Running counter to those arguments, Democrats said telework was a benefit to public service, allowing employees to increase productivity, while also contributing to higher engagement, satisfaction, and recruitment and retention trends.
Biden revisits post-pandemic work arrangements
Federal employees’ workplace arrangements hit another turning point in April 2023, when the Biden administration’s White House urged agencies to require telework-eligible federal employees to report to work on-site 50% of the time.
The Office of Management and Budget, at the time, said agencies were expected to increase “meaningful” in-person work at federal offices, while maintaining telework flexibilities where needed.
“It is the right time for agencies to assess their work environments, reflecting on what they have learned as they build routines for measuring and monitoring organizational health and organizational performance,” then-OMB Director Shalanda Young said.
The White House’s move received pushback from many federal employees who valued the flexibilities telework provided. Many argued that agency telework should not fall to a one-size-fits-all approach, and instead be based on individual agencies’ responsibilities and needs.
For years, federal employees had largely been saying they liked the increased telework during the pandemic. They figured out their “new normal” and didn’t necessarily want to go back to the office for what they saw as a political maneuver. About two-thirds of federal employees said on-site work makes them less productive, according to the results of an April 2024 Federal News Network survey.
“As we were doing re-entry, there was a recognition that there were some advantages that had come from teleworking, but I think there was also the memory of those growing pains that persisted, and that were at odds,” Maffucci said. “Some of those challenges came to a head, and as we were able to reopen buildings and bring people back into the office, there became this natural inflection point — to what extent should we be fully bringing people back into offices, versus taking advantage of the lessons learned and the benefits that we’ve seen from telework, and applying that in a post-COVID era?”
Across multiple annual telework reports, OPM maintained that using telework flexibilities led to cost savings. On top of reduced spending from fewer commuting and transit needs, agencies were increasingly starting to report “significant increases in cost savings” coming from reduced workforce turnover and lower rent and office space needs, OPM wrote in 2024. The report also showed that agencies had improved their ability to track and measure telework’s impact on productivity.
In the few years following the pandemic, agencies had begun putting together plans to scale back their office space holdings, in light of what they expected to remain a hybrid workforce for years to come.
But at the beginning of 2025, many of those plans were disrupted by a major shift in the government’s telework posture.
Trump orders a full-fledged return-to-office
After more than a year of agencies attempting to meet the Biden administration’s 50% in-the-office expectations, those plans were all but thrown out the window on President Donald Trump’s first day in office.
On Jan. 20, Trump immediately directed all agencies to return teleworking federal employees to the office full-time, and to cancel all remote work and telework arrangements. The order aligned with the anti-telework sentiments many congressional Republicans had been voicing for years.
The Trump administration’s OPM subsequently rescinded much of the previously existing guidance on federal telework, saying it no longer applied given the full return-to-office orders. But now, agencies face a lack of clarity in how they should proceed, according to analysis from GAO. In a June 2025 report, GAO said OPM should issue new guidance, after rescinding the old guidance, so agencies know what to do next.
“If agencies have a remote work posture, they need to assess whether the remote work posture is helping them effectively and efficiently meet mission needs — or make improvements if improvements need to be made,” Dawn Locke, GAO’s director of strategic issues, said in an interview. “And we believe that OPM can provide the guidance that will help with these assessments.”
As agencies began pushing all employees to begin fully on-site work schedules, the speed of the return to the office, coupled with many agencies who had begun scaling down their office space holdings, led to a number of early challenges. Many agencies faced issues like not enough parking, employees working in hallways or packed conference rooms — even running out of office supplies like toilet paper.
By that time, some agencies had already spent years working toward reducing their office space holdings and real estate spending, following an increase of telework and remote work. But after Trump’s return-to-office orders, many of those plans were indefinitely put on hold, GAO found.
“When January 2025 rolled around and there was the order to return to the office on a full-time basis, those agencies stopped reducing space, and they’re currently assessing their mission needs, their staffing needs and the office space needs that they have to determine whether they can reduce office space anymore,” Locke said.
Similar to years of OPM reports, GAO also found largely positive results from telework and remote work flexibilities across government — particularly on recruitment, retention and cost savings. For instance, a 2024 GAO study found that in identical job postings — where one opening is on-site and the other is remote — the remote opening will receive seven times the number of applicants.
“From what agencies have told us, they are likely going to take a hit on recruitment and retention because those workplace flexibilities are no longer available,” Locke said.
Regardless of the government’s current workplace posture, the Telework Enhancement Act is still enshrined in law. With currently limited telework, the legislation may not be doing much for the time being. But more likely than not — whether it’s months or years down the road — agencies are bound to see yet another shift in the federal future of work.
“When it comes to how we design the federal workplace, it’s unfortunate if you let political expediency interfere with good data, best practices and doing the hard work of figuring out what makes sense from a management and operational standpoint,” Sarbanes said. “Certain agencies offer great opportunities for insight and for making sure going forward, we manage this in an objective and sensible way.”
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