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- Per Axios, the Biden administration will take a hardline approach to remote work for federal workers.
- The White House chief of staff said federal workers should return to offices by September or October.
- The policy shift follows a pledge that Biden made during his March 2022 State of the Union speech.
President Joe Biden's administration is set to take a more forceful approach to ending remote work in the coming months, asking federal workers to return to physical offices by the fall.
According to a new report by Axios, citing an email sent from Biden's chief of staff Jeff Zients to cabinet members, Zients said that federal workers would aim to return to in-person work between September and October.
The plan builds on a pledge Biden made during his March 2022 speech, urging Americans to "fill our great downtowns," as many office spaces in Washington DC are still largely empty.
"We are returning to in-person work because it is critical to the well-being of our teams and will enable us to deliver better results for the American people," Zients said in the email, according to Axios. "This is a priority of the President — and I am looking to each of you to aggressively execute this shift in September and October."
The White House did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
The request by the Biden team was echoed by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg earlier this week, who claimed that customer service at federal agencies has suffered as a result of remote work.
Real estate experts previously told Insider that office vacancy in DC rose from 14.8% before the pandemic, to almost 20% at the start of 2023.
And a Government Accountability Office report from July stated that "17 of the 24 federal agencies used on average an estimated 25 percent or less of the capacity of their headquarters buildings."
As it stands, Biden's administration is seeking to buck a trend upheld by the administrations of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and his own, where federal offices have downsized over time and digitized more records.
from Business Insider https://ift.tt/O5wL0Fp
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