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Only 6% of federal employees report to an office for work? Not true | Fact check

Joedy McCreary   Paste BN
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The claim: 6% of federal employees ‘work full-time in an office’

A Jan. 28 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) claims to share a statistic about the prevalence of remote work among those employed by the U.S. government.

“It appears that only 6% of all federal employees work full-time in an office,” text of the post reads in part.

Versions of the claim circulated widely both and before President Donald Trump took office for his second term, and they were amplified by members of Congress, leading conservative commentators and the Trump White House.

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Our rating: False

The latest figures show 54% of federal employees perform their work duties fully on-site, not 6%, according to a federal agency’s August 2024 report to Congress that examined the majority of federal employees. The claim misrepresents the results of a news outlet’s unscientific survey that was not designed to reflect the federal workforce as a whole, according to one of its editors.

'Plenty of bogus and made-up data'

The Trump administration has vowed to slash the federal workforce and bring employees who work remotely back to their offices, claiming a link between telecommuting and federal bloat and citing the figure in the post as evidence of it.

But that statistic is wrong. The percentage of federal employees who report exclusively in person to work is significantly higher than 6%, a federal agency reported to Congress. The claim distorts an unscientific study conducted by a news outlet as being representative of the millions of federal workers nationwide.

“There is plenty of bogus and made-up data out there,” said Nicholas Bloom – a professor at Stanford University and the founder of a firm that studies remote work trends.

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The figure first appeared in a story published April 22, 2024, by the Federal News Network, an outlet that covers federal agencies. It surveyed roughly 6,300 people who identified themselves as federal employees in April 2024 and found 6% of them said they worked exclusively in-person – as opposed to either teleworking or working a combination of both options. The survey didn't address how many people worked "in an office," the term the Facebook post uses, as many federal positions involve in-person work that is not in an office setting.

In her December 2024 report that criticizes teleworking by federal employees, however, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst stated it in a different – and misleading – way. The document titled “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings” states 6% of federal workers report in-person on a full-time basis and attributes it to the Federal News Network story. It leaves out the context that the article is about survey respondents, not the full federal workforce of millions.

In response, the Federal News Network added an editor’s note to its report to explain its survey was non-scientific in nature. Its respondents were both self-selected – which, unlike a sample selected at random, increases the possibility of bias – and self-identified as federal employees.

“Our story never attempted to make any broad statistical claims about the federal workforce,” Jared Serbu, the publication’s deputy editor, said in an email to Paste BN.

Rather, he said, the figure “was part of an analysis of our own readership’s observations and attitudes surrounding return-to-office policies.”

Relaying the 6% figure from a survey is especially nonsensical since there is more recent and comprehensive data.

An August 2024 Office of Management and Budget study found 54% of the nation’s nearly 2.3 million federal CFO agency workers were fully on-site and serving in positions that required them to be physically present during all working hours as of May 2024. CFO agencies include the departments of agriculture, defense, education, energy, interior and labor among 24 total agencies. They comprise the majority of the roughly 3 million total federal employees.

The study found only 46% of the CFO agency employees were even eligible for remote work, and 10% of them worked remotely with no expectation of doing so in person.

In an email to Paste BN, Ernst spokesperson Zach Kraft defended the senator's interpretation of the figure in her report, saying it came “from a large-scale survey of over 6,000 federal employees.” His response, however, made no mention of the limitations of the survey outlined in the outlet’s update.

The 6% claim has since been repeated by conservative commentators Sean Hannity and Ben Shapiro as evidence of government waste. Tennessee Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, a Republican, cited it in a Facebook post that characterizes federal employees working remotely as “lazy and entitled DC bureaucrats.” Both NBC News and Axios quoted an unidentified Trump White House official who referenced Ernst's figure to justify its push to trim the federal workforce.

That figure, Bloom said, “likely has been persistently cited not because it’s correct but because it fits the political narrative from some group.”

Paste BN reached out to the White House, to spokespeople for Fleischmann, Hannity and Shapiro, and to the Facebook user who shared the claim but did not receive any responses.

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