Sponsors (2)
Introduced January 13, 2025 by James Lankford · Last progress January 13, 2025
The bill standardizes and increases access to federal telework and creates targeted noncompetitive hiring to help veterans and military families, while imposing managerial controls, reporting requirements, and reimbursement and hiring rules that can raise costs, complicate pay/benefits, and limit competition for some applicants.
Federal employees gain clearer, standardized definitions, eligibility rules, agreements, and appeals processes for telework and remote work, creating more predictable access and administration of remote work across agencies.
Agencies (and taxpayers indirectly) get standardized requirements to evaluate telework costs/savings and cybersecurity needs, enabling better budgeting decisions and potential reinvestment of savings.
Qualified veterans, spouses of active-duty service members, and (via a time-limited pilot) spouses of law enforcement officers gain noncompetitive pathways to permanent remote federal jobs, increasing hiring and retention opportunities for those groups.
Remote federal employees may be required to periodically report to agency worksites and will not be reimbursed for travel within 75 miles, increasing commuting burdens and out-of-pocket costs for many remote workers.
Designating an approved alternative worksite as the 'official worksite' can change locality pay, travel reimbursements, and benefits calculations for remote employees, with financial impacts for workers and agencies.
New reporting, survey, training, and regulatory requirements create additional administrative costs for agencies that could divert resources from other services and priorities.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Clarifies telework and remote‑work definitions, limits written telework agreements to one year with annual reviews, and allows noncompetitive hiring of certain veterans and spouses into remote federal positions with a law‑enforcement spouse pilot.
Rewrites federal telework definitions and sets new procedural rules for agency telework agreements, including a one-year maximum agreement length and annual supervisory reviews tied to performance and agency needs. It also authorizes noncompetitive (excepted) hiring into permanent remote positions for qualified veterans and certain military spouses, and establishes a time-limited pilot permitting noncompetitive hiring of some law-enforcement spouses; OPM must issue implementing regulations and report on the pilot.