GAO Tells Trump Administration to Keep Tracking Remote Work Impact
Even though President Trump ordered the vast majority of the federal workforce back into the office five days a week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) urged the Trump Administration to update guidance on remote work.
The GAO report notes that there are still thousands of federal employees working remotely, including military spouses, people with disabilities, and other workers who have exceptions.
The report took issue with the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) cancellation of August 2024 guidance that agencies assess the impact of remote work on their mission, recruitment, and retention. OPM says the cancellation of that guidance makes it less like that agencies will understand the impact of remote work on outcomes and operations.
“Conducting such assessments would provide agencies with important insights into how their use of remote work could be improved,” noted GAO.
Nine Percent of Federal Workers
The report also looked back at the status of remote work in June 2024. During that time, there were over 207,710 remote employees in the 24 CFO Act agencies, amounting to nine percent of that workforce, with workers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
GAO noted that remote work helped boost recruitment, pointing out that “agencies with a higher percentage of remote job announcements were more likely to meet hiring goals for mission-critical jobs.” For example, “for similar positions, remote job announcements received 366 applications on average, compared to 51 for non-remote.”
The watchdog issued one recommendation for OPM to issue guidance to agencies to assess benefits and costs when offering remote work. OPM partially concurred, saying that it canceled the August 2024 guidance because “it conflicted with Trump administration policy and had not been successful in obtaining meaningful data or oversight regarding remote work.”
OPM said it will issue further data calls to measure “the benefits and costs when offering remote work positions.”
U.S. Census Bureau Looks at Remote Work
This comes as the broader conversations on remote work both in the public and private sectors continue.
Stanford Economics Professor Nick Bloom, considered one of the top authorities on the impact of remote work, recently cited data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau surveyed 150,000 firms from November 2024 to January 2025 on their views on remote work. It found that overall, work remotely is here to stay, with firms planning to keep at least one work from home day a week on average through the year 2029.
It also found that industry matters, with workers in technology averaging the most work from home days, while workers in accommodations and food services averaged the least with almost none.
“Will this stop the misleading anecdotes from some execs, office brokers and management "experts" claiming that WFH is ending? No - probably not - but at least we know the truth,” wrote Bloom on LinkedIn.
