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

The strongest good-faith objection: locking telework eligibility into statute, tied to "measured service-quality data," still requires someone to define and adjudicate what counts as adequate data and adequate quality, a process that could become its own political battleground (whose data, measured how, by whom) rather than depoliticizing the question the way this issue hopes. The Texas reversal happened through ordinary legislative give-and-take reacting to experience. A critic could argue that flexibility is preferable to a rigid federal statute that's harder to adjust as new data arrives. But Texas's own reversal is the case for this issue's approach, not against it: the legislature acted because a mandate had been imposed by executive order with no evidentiary basis in the first place, then reversed once data existed. A statute that builds the data requirement in from the start doesn't remove legislative flexibility (Congress can still amend a statute); it just replaces "reverse course after the fact once a mandate turns out badly" with "require the evidence up front before the mandate is imposed," which is a higher, not lower, bar for the next administration's first-week executive order to clear.

Federal employees currently subject to executive-order whiplash bear the cost of continued uncertainty until any statute passes. Agencies bear the administrative cost of designing and defending a "measured data" standard against legal and political challenge. Workers in any agency or role where the data doesn't clearly support the outcome they'd prefer bear the cost of a standard that follows evidence rather than preference. That's the intended effect, not a flaw: the statute is tied to measured data by agency and role specifically so it isn't a uniform, one-size-fits-all rule in the first place, and a policy that occasionally disappoints someone's preference on the strength of data is doing its job.