For D.C.'s federal employees, 90 percent of life is not showing up

For Democratic congressional staffers too

Downtown Washington D.C. isn’t the ghost town it was at the height of the pandemic. But almost three years after the pandemic began and almost two years after the risk of serious illness from covid declined significantly, downtown D.C. remains rather lifeless. As Politico puts it:

In the 9-to-5 core of Washington, there’s no mistaking the 2023 reality with the pre-Covid world. Streets are noticeably emptier and businesses scarcer. Crime has ticked up. The city’s remarkable quarter-century run of population growth and economic dynamism and robust tax revenues seems in danger.

The reason is obvious. A large portion of the federal workforce is working from home.

A few months ago, the Federal Times reported that only one-in-three federal employees was at the office full time. Around one-in-five never shows up.

Thus:

According to census data, Washington has the highest work-from-home rate in the country. Week-to-week numbers from the security firm Kastle Systems back this up: The company, whose key fobs are used in office buildings around the country compiles real-time occupancy data based on card swipes in its 10 largest markets. D.C. is perennially dead last.

Accordingly, Mayor Muriel Bowser has asked Joe Biden to order federal workers back to the office. The mayor’s move won’t endear her to the large number of government workers in her constituency, but Bowser’s priority is to relieve the distress that telework is causing the city.

House Republicans also want federal employees to return to the office. Some conservative members are cosponsoring the SHOW UP bill. It would require that federal agencies return to their pre-covid office arrangements within 30 days. House Oversight Committee chair James Comer has also signaled plans to investigate the shortcomings of telework.

The SHOW UP bill gained the support of Washington D.C.’s delegate to the U.S. House, the hardcore left-liberal Eleanor Holmes Norton. She told the Washington Post she “very strongly” supports the legislation.

However, Norton recanted, presumably in response to pushback from constituents who would rather stay at home. She now claims she “misspoke.” The Post comments, dryly, that “Norton declined to. . .explain why she reversed her position or what she misspoke about.”

The fact that D.C. sends Norton, now 85 years old, back to Congress every two years shows that the city’s problems aren’t confined to federal employees not showing up.

I’ll leave it to readers to judge (1) the extent to which working from home diminishes the productivity of federal employees and (2) the extent to which diminished productivity by federal employees is bad for the country.

Showing up at the office does seem important if we’re talking about employees on congressional staffs. Although I’ve never worked on the Hill, I imagine that the work involves substantially more face-to-face interaction and ready access to co-workers than the average job (and certainly more than for the government lawyer job I held many decades ago).

A couple of months back, a Senate staff member told me that staffers who work for members of one party almost all come to the Capitol, while staffers who work for members of the other party rarely do. Would you like to guess which party is which?

Right. Republican staffers come to work; Democratic staffers stay home (or did as of late last year).

Long may this continue. The more effectively the offices of Republican members operate in comparison to those of Democratic members, the better.

If D.C.’s economy has to get by without the presence of Democratic congressional staffers, so be it.