Federal workforce returns as virus cases rise
WASHINGTON — As coronavirus cases surge around the country and epidemiologists urge caution, the federal government is heading back to work, jeopardizing pandemic progress in one of the few regions where confirmed infections continue to decline: the nation’s capital.
At the Energy Department’s headquarters, 20 percent of employees — possibly as many as 600 — have been authorized to return on a full- or parttime basis. The Interior Department said in a statement last month that it anticipated about 1,000 workers to soon return daily to its main office near the White House.
The Defense Department has authorized up to 80 percent of its workforce to return to office spaces, which could result in as many as 18,000 employees inside the Pentagon building, according to a spokesperson. Many of them are already there.
Private-sector employers remain hesitant to put workers back in their seats. Restaurant and bar owners around the country are shutting their doors anew. But agency chiefs at the nation’s largest employer, the 2.1 million-strong federal government, are taking their cues from an impatient President Donald Trump and summoning employees to their desks.
“Federal employees have been working throughout the entire pandemic,” said Everett Kelley, the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal workers in the District of Columbia. “To move them to a work site so the administration can say they reopened the government is irresponsible.”
Governments in the capital region are less than enthusiastic about a rush back. Coronavirus cases in Washington, Maryland and Virginia are now holding steady, but just days ago, cases in Washington had been declining.
A panel of public health experts chosen to inform Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s reopening strategy in Washington recommended initially capping office buildings at 25 percent capacity, a threshold some federal agencies will soon exceed. In April, Gov.
Ralph Northam of Virginia, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland and Bowser signed a letter urging the Trump administration to continue encouraging telework for the federal workforce as much as possible.
And many private employers in the region, like Capital One, have closed their offices to nonessential workers until at least Labor Day.
But federal back-to-work orders are not changing. And that has local epidemiologists worried.
“You don’t want to negate all of the hard work that the D.C., Maryland, Virginia regions have done to reduce the number of cases of coronavirus in our region, by then returning everyone to work and potentially reversing the trends,” said Amanda Castel, an epidemiology professor at George Washington University.
Several agencies are still encouraging some telework while pressing supervisors and managers to identify employees to bring back to offices immediately.
The Energy Department began that process last week. According to a backto-work order obtained by The New York Times, employees asked to report to the department’s offices will be questioned about flulike symptoms or contacts with coronavirus patients. The document did not say whether workers would undergo temperature screenings. It did say that while masks would be provided, employees would be encouraged, but not required, to wear them.
Employees with reservations but without heightened risk factors such as age or preexisting conditions would still be required to return. Those tapped to come in could be given as little as a week’s notice to prepare.
Beyond the Interior Department’s Washington headquarters, which are stirring back to life, department leaders said its “bureaus and offices should begin bringing employees back to office spaces to better satisfy operational needs,” according to agency work orders.
The department said it was working to provide face coverings but stopped short of requiring them. Employees were asked to voluntarily observe signs stating new occupancy limits in certain rooms and urged to wear masks in crowded spaces where social distancing could not be maintained.
“At the IRS, we were told that employees were going to be coming back into buildings that had been cleaned, and I’ve gotten a number of reports recently where employees have gone back into buildings that were in no way cleaned,” said Tony Reardon, the national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 federal workers.
“I think employees simply feel like the agency doesn’t care about them personally,” Reardon said. “It is taking a morale that was already low in the federal workplace and driving it even lower.”
In planning for workers to return, agencies are navigating sometimes conflicting guidance from the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of Personnel Management and state and city leaders. The result is a patchwork of plans.
The Department of Homeland Security, for example, is still stressing telework; the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has given employees the option to extend work from home as late as September.
“This is the fallout of not having a countrywide plan for how to go about this and having certain standards that everyone has to meet and adhere to,” Castel said.