Claim that only 6% of federal employees work in the office is false

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa on Dec. 5 released a report criticizing current workplace practices, particularly remote work. Ernst was appointed as the chair of the newly formed Senate Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Caucus, a caucus that collaborates with an advisory group led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to reduce government waste.

According to the report, only 3% of the federal workforce teleworked daily before the COVID-19 pandemic. Ernst claims that now just 6% of federal employees work in-person full-time, while nearly one-third are entirely remote. She has reiterated this claim on Fox News. 

Various news outlets and Sean Hannity have also shared the 6% statistic.

A VERIFY reader texted us asking if it’s true that only 6% of federal employees work in person full-time.

THE QUESTION

Is it true only 6% of federal employees work in person full-time?

THE SOURCES

• Report by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa)
• Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
• Office of Personnel Management (OPM)
• Survey published by the Federal News Network (FNN)
• American Federation of Remote Employees

THE ANSWER

No, claims that only 6% of federal employees work in person full-time are false. 

WHAT WE FOUND

Sen. Joni Ernst claims only 6% of federal employees report to an office, but an August report from the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) contradicts this. According to an OMB report from August 2024, 10% of federal employees work fully remotely and 54% worked fully on-site because their jobs required in-person presence. 

There are 2.28 million federal government employees, OMB says.

The remaining 46%, about 1.1 million employees, were telework-eligible, meaning they could work remotely unless they chose to go into the office. Only 10% of employees were in fully remote roles, because they lacked a physical office to report to. According to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), telework policies vary by federal agency and an arrangement is usually made between the employee and management on how often an employee can work remotely.

Ernst’s 6% figure came from a survey conducted by the Federal News Network (FNN), which publishes news and analysis impacting federal employees, not official data. The study relied on self-reported and self-selected responses from 6,338 people who said they were federal employees. After Ernst’s report citing FNN’s study was released, the article was updated with an editor’s note explaining the data’s limitations and including OMB’s actual figures.

“Editor’s Note: This story was updated on Dec. 6 to clarify that the survey was a non-scientific survey of respondents who self-reported that they are current federal employees, and who were self-selected. The story was also updated to include the latest OMB data on the actual amount of telework and onsite work being performed governmentwide. This Federal Report covers initial analysis of Federal News Network’s April 2024 return-to-office survey of federal employees. The story includes results for several of the survey’s questions, but not all of them,” the FNN article says at the top.

The survey  aimed to “gauge [federal employees] perspectives on recent return-to-office changes at their agencies,” the FNN article says.

“Of the survey respondents, about 30% said they work entirely remotely, 6% work entirely in-person and 64% were working on a hybrid schedule — a mix of in-person work and telework. The breakdown of telework versus onsite work for survey respondents differs significantly from the actual breakdown for the federal workforce overall,” the FNN article says. 

Elon Musk has also claimed “the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%.” The OMB report disproves that as well.

The report says that, excluding those required to work remotely, 79.4% of working hours were spent in-person. For workers in hybrid roles – those splitting time between the office and remote settings – 61.2% of working hours were spent in-person. 

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) criticized the inaccurate telework statistics being recently shared, accusing “members of President-elect Trump’s transition team” of using misleading data to justify privatizing federal jobs. 

“Exaggerating the number of federal employees who telework and portraying those who do as failing to show up for work is a deliberate attempt to demean the federal workforce and justify the wholesale privatization of public-sector jobs,” the AFGE says. 

VERIFY reached out to Ernst’s office for comment, but did not hear back at the time of publication.