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

Remote work isn't one policy question — it's at least two, and they get confused constantly. Whether a private company requires in-person attendance is a management decision, properly settled between employers and employees or their unions. Washington should mandate neither direction. Two federal-policy problems sit underneath the broader remote-work conversation, and both have been sitting unfixed for over a decade:

1. The interstate tax patchwork. A worker who travels or works remotely across state lines can trigger nonresident income-tax filing obligations in every state they touch, with wildly inconsistent thresholds and only patchy reciprocity agreements between states. This has nothing to do with whether remote work is good policy. It's a compliance mess that punishes exactly the kind of labor mobility a modern economy depends on. The fix, the Mobile Workforce Act, already has bipartisan sponsors in the Senate and has simply never gotten a floor vote. Its own champion, Thune, now holds the Majority Leader's gavel. That kind of opening doesn't come along often.
2. Federal workforce telework policy has become a whiplash problem. Telework eligibility for federal employees has been set and reversed by executive order, fought over in arbitration on a contract-by-contract basis, and treated as a partisan flag. Service, productivity, recruitment, and retention provide measurable answers. The current whiplash is a worse outcome for taxpayers and employees alike than either "always remote" or "always in-person." It's policy by whiplash. It doesn't have to stay that way: Texas's own Republican-led legislature reversed its return-to-office mandate 132-11, once the state's own data showed telework hadn't hurt service and had, if anything, cut turnover. A near-unanimous vote like that is proof this doesn't have to be a partisan fight.