Remote Work: Fix the Federal Rules, Don't Legislate the Office

The two questions this issue refuses to conflate

"Is remote work good?" is not a federal policy question in the way it keeps getting treated. For the roughly 87% of the workforce employed in the private sector, whether a given company requires in-person attendance is exactly the kind of decision a market economy is supposed to sort out between employers competing for workers and workers choosing where to work. Some companies will require in-person collaboration and pay for it, others will offer remote flexibility and compete on that basis, and the productivity research doesn't support a confident verdict either way at a macro level. That's not something this platform should try to legislate, and doing so would contradict the party's own general skepticism of regulation that isn't solving an identified problem.

What is a legitimate federal question is the roughly one-fifth of the workforce category where the federal government is itself the employer, plus a decade-old interstate compliance problem that has nothing to do with anyone's opinion about office culture.

Federal telework: whiplash as a policy failure mode in itself

Federal telework eligibility has been expanded by statute (Congress required agencies to expand it starting around 2010), narrowed by executive order in 2025 with directions to end remote work "as soon as practicable," fought over agency-by-agency in labor arbitration under existing union contracts (with arbitrators repeatedly ruling in favor of unions on contract-bargaining grounds at HHS, CMS, HUD, and the Social Security Administration), and litigated over whether courts even have jurisdiction to review the underlying order at all. The result, as of mid-2026, isn't a coherent policy in either direction. It's a patchwork of agency-specific outcomes depending on which union contract existed, which arbitrator heard the case, and how a given circuit court has ruled on jurisdiction. Disability accommodation carve-outs exist on paper but have been inconsistently honored in practice, adding an equity problem on top of the underlying policy chaos.

The most useful real-world data point cuts against treating this as a fixed ideological question at all: Texas, a Republican-led state, imposed its own return-to-office mandate for state employees in 2025 and reversed it within three months, via a bill that passed its legislature 132-11 (a lopsided, bipartisan margin), specifically because the state's own data showed telework hadn't hurt service quality and had, if anything, reduced turnover. That's not an outcome that fits a clean "conservatives want RTO, progressives want remote" story. Instead, it shows a state government looking at its own numbers and changing course accordingly, which is exactly the standard this issue proposes applying at the federal level by statute rather than re-litigating with every transition of power.

The tax patchwork nobody defends on the merits

Unlike telework itself, the interstate tax compliance problem has essentially no principled defenders. It exists because fixing it requires federal legislation preempting a patchwork of state rules, and that kind of bill has never quite cleared the finish line despite being reintroduced in nearly every Congress since 2011 and passing the House by voice vote once already. A worker who crosses state lines for even a single day of work can, under some states' rules, trigger a nonresident filing obligation, a compliance burden with no plausible policy rationale behind it beyond historical accident and the absence of a forcing function to fix it.