REMOTE Act

The bill also addresses in-office activity at department headquarters. Beginning 180 days after enactment, departments must require employees and relevant contractors who regularly work at headquarters to use their Personal Identity Verification (PIV) or Common Access Cards (CAC) to log in. Agencies must collect comparable data for these on-site workers: average daily logins, average connection duration, and network traffic generated while working at headquarters. That data must also be retained for at least three years.

Critically, departments must publish telework utilization data annually in their budget justification materials (the same documents they send to Congress to explain and defend their budget requests). The published data must protect personally identifiable information but show, for each weekday, how the average login rates of remote teleworkers compare to: (1) the number of employees approved to telework remotely that day, and (2) the average login rates of employees working from the department’s headquarters. This creates a regular, standardized benchmark for Congress and the public to see whether employees approved for remote work are actually logging in and how that compares to their on-site peers.

Section 3 amends the Telework Enhancement Act reporting regime at 5 U.S.C. §6506(d). Each year, Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCOs), in consultation with Telework Managing Officers, must report to the CHCO Council on management efforts to promote efficient telework use, and specifically describe adverse effects of telework policy on agency performance, including any increase in disciplinary actions. The bill also requires, within 60 days of enactment, that CHCOs establish a policy mandating that any manager who revokes an employee’s telework privileges for reasons specific to that employee must provide written documentation to the agency’s human capital office and to the employee. That documentation must include: the employee’s identifying job details and pay rate; a detailed tally of telework days over the prior six work periods, itemized by day; a narrative explaining the circumstances and confirming the revocation’s propriety under agency policy; and any steps the manager took to discipline the employee before revocation. The human capital office must retain this information for a reasonable time after the employee leaves the agency. This creates a due-process paper trail around telework revocations and supports oversight of management decisions.

In practical terms, the bill aims to deliver a consistent, department-wide baseline for measuring telework and in-office activity through network-based activity metrics. It gives Congress comparable data year over year to assess utilization and trends and equips agency leadership with records that can be audited by Inspectors General or GAO. It also tries to balance transparency and privacy by requiring PII protection in published reports while still mandating the collection and retention of detailed metadata.

Potential operational effects include new IT and cybersecurity demands to track, store, and secure network telemetry for at least three years; additional managerial responsibilities to review teleworker network traffic; and procedural requirements and documentation burdens before, during, and after revoking telework privileges. The bill’s emphasis on “adverse effects” of telework in CHCO reports could tilt narratives toward risk and performance concerns, yet the revocation documentation requirement provides employee protections and standardization that could reduce arbitrary or inconsistent management actions. Overall, the REMOTE Act is a data-centric oversight and governance framework for federal telework, designed to inform budget, workforce, and space-planning decisions without directly dictating where employees work.