Martin O’Malley, the former Social Security commissioner who is now seeking to chair the Democratic National Committee, took the brunt of House GOP anger over federal telework policies – and a number of other topics – in a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on Thursday.
Republicans primarily took aim at O’Malley’s role in overseeing a late 2024 deal between the Social Security Administration (SSA) and its workers’ union, the American Federation of Government Employees, that will lock in the current levels of telework for union employees until October 2029 – beyond the end of the Trump administration.
O’Malley, a former Maryland governor, was in charge of the agency when that deal was inked. He left the post in November.
“How is this good for democracy? The voters just delivered President Trump an electoral mandate to run the executive branch. Should union contracts designed to tie his hands take precedence over the mandate by the people?” House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said in his opening statement.
O’Malley said that he had changed on-site work requirements for those at SSA headquarters and aimed to boost regional requirements for in-person work.
And O’Malley told Comer that in exchange for the telework agreement, the union gave up on a number of years-long grievances that, had they gone to trial, could have resulted in $10 million to $20 million in potential exposure for the agency.
The real challenge for the SSA, O’Malley said in his opening statement, was a shrinking staff.
“Social Security, today, is struggling to serve more customers than ever with staffing levels which you have reduced to 50-year lows,” O’Malley said. “Actions by Congress have reduced the customer service staffing to record lows, he said, adding that the “agency is forced to serve more and more customers than ever with fewer and fewer staff, year after year, after year.”
O’Malley’s bid to be chair of the Democratic National Committee was also brought up multiple times by Republicans, with some bringing up topics far removed from the issue of federal telework.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who has become a leading anti-transgender voice in Congress, asked O’Malley to define what a woman is.
“You’re going to ask me to define what a woman is?” O’Malley asked. “I’m talking to a woman right now, a distinguished woman … I think you’re kind of denigrating the purpose of this hearing.”
“So the potentially future chair of the Democrat Party cannot define – let’s just for the record, Mr. Chairman – he cannot define what a woman is,” Mace said.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) during the hearing brought up O’Malley’s Catholic faith, and asked: “Do you serve God or do you serve the Democrat Party? … Will you be supporting the murder of the unborn up until the day of birth like your party does?”
“I trust the judgement of women and doctors over the judgement of government,” O’Malley said.
The hearing on federal telework policies, the first hearing for the committee in the new Congress, comes as Republicans plot ideas to compel more workers back to the office when President-elect Trump takes power.
“To be clear, since the height of the pandemic, much of the federal workforce has gotten up and gone to work every day. This, for example, includes those working in veterans hospitals, patrolling the border, and performing other law enforcement functions,” Comer said in his opening statement.
“But the Biden Administration’s own data shows that the vast majority of federal office workers around the nation remain at home either some, most, or all the time.”
The focus on federal telework is complementary to a major focus of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a commission that President-elect Trump has pledged to create. Incoming DOGE co-chiefs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have criticized federal work-from-home policies.
“President Trump was elected to put the federal bureaucracy in its place, and that includes back in the office,” said Greene, who will chair a Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) subcommittee that aims to coordinate with the White House commission.
Democrats on the committee defended the practice of federal employees being able to telework.
“When it comes to employee telework, we should be focused on employee performance and the bottom line, not a rigid schedule of five days a week, eight hours a day,” said Ranking Member Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). “There is a difference between universal remote working in a pandemic and a scheduled architecture for telework that is programmed, approved, and overseen.”
Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) called the hearing a “political assault on the federal workforce.”
And Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) turned Republicans’ own focus on “efficiency” back on them.
“Since Republicans are so obsessed with efficiency that they created a subcommittee around it, I would love to talk about government efficiency,” Lee said. “I think my Republican colleagues need to face some hard truths that some workers are going to be more efficient at home. Some are even going to get more work done or even work more hours by working from home. They waste less time, too, when they’re not commuting to the office.”
Former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), who is now president of the Federal City Council, a non-profit dedicated to advancing civic life in Washington, D.C., said that the federal government’s work-from-home rate had contributed to declining commercial property values, closure of small businesses, and put financial strain on public transit systems.
“This isn’t just about maintaining buildings — it’s about maintaining the vibrant, collaborative environment that has long made Washington DC a unique and dynamic capital city,” Davis said.
Republican staff on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee – its name recently updated from “Oversight and Accountability” in the last Congress – also released a report on Wednesday tearing into federal telework policies, titled: “The Lights Are On, But Everyone Is at Home: Why the New Administration Will Enter Largely Vacant Federal Agency Offices.”
It made several recommendations to adjust employee telework, including restoring telework at agencies to no more than pre-pandemic levels; considering legislation to disallow collective bargaining over federal employee telework; and to lower set local pay for remote federal employees at the “Rest of United States” rate, rather than the higher rates set for certain geographic areas.
According to a Biden administration report released last year, about 1.2 million of the 2.28 million federal workforce personnel worked fully on-site, while 1.1 million were telework eligible, as of May 2024. Rates of in-person working hours for employees varied by agency, from a low of 37.1 percent for the Department of Housing and Urban Development to a high of 93.7 percent at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
