Democrats and Republicans in the nation’s capital are calling for federal employees to return to their posts in person as Washington, D.C.’s economy is in jeopardy and workers weigh how the move will affect family life.
President Joe Biden asked federal agency officials to call their employees back to the office earlier this month, with a plan to report for in-person work this fall.
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“As we look towards the fall, and with the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency, your agencies will be implementing increases in the amount of in-person work for your team,” White House chief of staff Jeff Zients wrote in an Aug. 4 email to Cabinet leadership. “This is a priority of the President — and I am looking to each of you to aggressively execute this shift in September and October.”
Republicans have also joined the call, condemning the Biden administration for not acting quickly enough and to return to work following the end of the coronavirus emergency declaration.
In a letter to Small Business Administration Administrator Isabella Guzman, Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), chairman of the House Small Business Committee, said, “According to President Biden, the COVID pandemic has been over for 11 months. Why the federal government is just now planning on getting back to work is beyond me.”
Williams’s letter also mentioned the harm to small businesses and the waste of taxpayer dollars from “underutilized” federal buildings with a fraction of the in-person staff they were meant to hold.
A Government Accountability Office report from July noted that “17 of the 24 federal agencies used on average an estimated 25 percent or less of the capacity of their headquarters buildings.” Even agencies on the “higher range” of in-person work did not surpass a 50% threshold.
According to the report, agencies spend around $2 billion per year to operate federal office buildings, regardless of the in-person capacity. They also spend about $5 billion per year to lease buildings.
More than taxpayer costs to maintain buildings, however, is the economic damage working from home has done to Washington, D.C., as a city.
As office buildings emptied in the nation’s capital, tax revenue made from those large properties dropped. In 2022, that cash stream alone made up just under 9% of the city’s total revenue.
A 2022 study by the D.C. Policy Center found that 137 of 733 large office buildings in the city had higher than 25% vacancy rates, causing property owners to start filing challenges to property tax assessments from the city. That is coupled with the fact that the assessed value of the same office buildings dropped from $69 billion to 60% billion in 2021, according to city data.
In February, Washington Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee said a continuation of the remote work policy poses “a serious long-term risk to the District’s economy and its tax base.”
That concern is borne out in the D.C. Policy Center’s analysis, which found that if the city’s roughly 155,000 commuters worked from home three days per week, the city could see $62.9 million in sales tax revenue losses.
Before the pandemic, 70% of workers with remote-capable jobs commuted four or more days per week, compared to 19% now.
There is also a diminished desire for many workers to end their remote lifestyles, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll from March.
That survey found 47% of area workers say their job can be done remotely, 37% of whom work fully from home. Another 48% have a hybrid working arrangement, while 13 are fully in person. About 66% of those workers would prefer remote work most of the time, and 38% said they would prefer it all the time.
The preference to stay home is complicated by several factors, but for many, it has been parents’ ability to stay home and raise their children without having to worry as much about third-party childcare.
According to research done by the Institute for Family Studies and Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute, more than 50% of mothers and fathers with children would prefer to work from home half or most of the time.
“Covid gave them the opportunity to experience that, and they liked it,” study co-author and BYU professor Jenet Erickson, whose research specializes in maternal and child well-being, told the Washington Examiner. “There are strong reasons as to why parents identify caring for their children at home as the ideal.”
“A close, consistent, emotionally available relationship beginning with the mother during the earliest period of development, and with the father as development continues lays the essential foundation for brain and body development,” she continued, adding that “parents intuitively understand” this.
Parents experienced new ways to orient care for their children, and preference for at-home care from parents, in some form, was preferred by 30% of parents over third-party child care, which was the preference of 11% of parents.
The time parents spend at home with their children is essential to early childhood development, Erickson said, which is “dependent on a specific quality of social-emotional experience within the core relationships of family life.”
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Extensive time spent in center-based daycare has been associated with risk in social-emotional development. “Young children from average, healthy homes could be harmed by spending long hours away from their parents,” Erickson said.
“This does not mean that spending any time in child care during the early years of development puts children at risk,” she continued. “In fact, evidence suggests that high-quality care can be beneficial for children from disadvantaged homes.”
