More than half of the employees of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — the federal government’s central human resources agency — failed to comply with longstanding teleworking rules in 2024, including many who appear to have falsified their weekly performance reports, according to an internal watchdog’s report.

The June 16 report was prepared by OPM’s Inspector General (IG) and was originally requested in 2023 by Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa). Krista Boyd was appointed by President Joe Biden and confirmed unanimously by the Senate as IG in April 2022. The position had been vacant for six years prior to Boyd’s appointment.

With less than 3,000 full-time employees, OPM is one of the smallest agencies in the federal government, but the office has significant regulatory authority over where and how the 2.3 million career civil servants perform their duties. That authority includes oversight of the Teleworking Enhancement Act of 2010 that set the most recent ground rules for federal workers seeking to spend part of their workweeks performing their duties at home or another remote location.

The 2010 law mandated that employees who perform some portion of their workweek outside of their official duty stations must have an approved agreement with their employing agency that includes weekly reports of their work locations. The agreement must be re-certified annually.

Teleworking was rare in the government until the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 when keeping people at home was a key part of the response to the highly contagious virus. The pandemic was declared officially ended in 2023, but by that time most federal employees were working at least part of the workweek from their homes. Many federal facilities, especially in the nation’s capital, were often all but deserted.

A 2024 investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability said the buildings were mostly empty because the Biden administration was not serious about returning workers to their official duty stations.

“The committee’s efforts helped shine a light on the ongoing stay-at-home policies across federal agencies that the White House rarely mentioned. The sunlight eventually pressured the Biden-Harris administration to try to return some federal employees to their offices,” the investigation’s report said.

“These limited efforts to instate return to work (RTO) policies, however, largely failed, and the administration failed to accomplish even its own stated RTO objectives. Much of that failure was attributable to the successful resistance of federal employee labor unions, due to their success in having already successfully managed to embed generous telework guarantees in collective bargaining agreements entered into with pliant Biden-Harris Administration appointees,” the report continued.

President Donald Trump responded on his first day in office of his second term to widespread news media and congressional oversight reports of such government-wide abuses of federal teleworking by ordering all departments and agencies to abolish teleworking programs.

At the same time, Acting OPM Director Chuck Ezell instructed department and agency heads to “revise telework policies to state that employees must work full-time from their official duty station, unless excused due to a disability, qualifying medical condition or other compelling reason certified by the agency and the employee’s supervisor.”

But the IG report suggests OPM did a poor job of overseeing its own teleworking programs during the final year of the Biden administration. Nearly 30% of the agency’s teleworking agreements were lapsed, meaning they had not been re-certified for at least one year.

The report also found “there were no official documented procedures with specified frequencies for the oversight and monitoring being performed by [OPM]. Additionally, there were no official requirements for timely resolution of identified discrepancies by program offices. The lack of timely resolution of discrepancies could lead to an increased rate of noncompliance with telework-related laws and OPM policies.”

The OPM watchdog also found a disturbing pattern of discrepancies between the data provided by teleworking employees on their timesheets and that of OPM’s badging records that show when employees enter and leave the agency’s facilities. The employee timesheets are required to show hours worked, leave taken, and other related performance data, which is supposed to be certified by supervisors.

But when the IG compared what was claimed on employee timesheets with the badging data, it turned out the latter did not confirm the data on 58% of the timesheets examined.

“Under the previous administration, OPM’s telework and remote work policies were mismanaged and oversight was virtually nonexistent,” Ezell said in a statement. “That era of telework abuse is over. At President Trump’s direction, OPM has restored in-person operations to ensure federal employees are working for the taxpayers.”

Ernst said she believes the IG report validates her widely reported criticism of the Biden administration’s lax enforcement of teleworking regulations.

“I exposed widespread telework and locality pay abuses under the Biden administration that led to government buildings being ghost towns,” said Ernst. “It should come as no surprise that those setting telework policy under Joe Biden were some of the worst abusers of it. Now that I have worked with the Trump administration to get out-of-office bureaucrats back to work, we’re right-sizing the federal government’s portfolio of vacant and underutilized buildings that cost billions every year. DOGE is a lifestyle, and we must constantly look for ways to increase efficiency in Washington and save tax dollars!” 

The Iowa Republican also observed that “while the Biden administration slow walked releasing the data to hide the true extent of telework abuse, the Trump administration has made a commitment to transparency in addition to getting bureaucrats back to work.”

House Oversight panel Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) told The Washington Stand that his committee has been pressuring the executive branch to tighten up teleworking enforcement for several years.

“The Biden administration allowed federal bureaucrats to waste American taxpayers’ money and exploit overly generous telework policies. President Trump took action on his first day in office to hold federal workers accountable for abusing telework policies and return them to in-person work,” Comer said.

“The House Oversight Committee has worked tirelessly to get federal employees back in the office, from sending letters to 24 federal agencies about telework policies and passing the SHOW UP Act last Congress, to releasing a report in January 2025 exposing the Biden administration’s efforts to keep federal bureaucrats at home. Republicans are bringing efficiency back to the federal workforce and are ensuring hardworking Americans’ tax dollars are spent on keeping government workers present in their offices, not at home,” Comer added.