Metro said on Thursday that it will substantially boost its commuter operations next month, running more trains during busy times, particularly on high-demand days such as Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. After train safety concerns and a pandemic-driven dip in ridership, the region’s transit agency is getting back to normal at serving the area’s commuters. Which means the moment has come for the Biden administration to make good on the president’s call for federal workers to return to the office.
“It’s time for Americans to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again” with people, Mr. Biden said in his State of the Union address last March. “We’re doing that here in the federal government. The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.”
Yet a look around downtown Washington’s barren sidewalks, empty restaurants and shuttered shops shows that the city is still suffering. The federal government is Washington’s largest employer, accounting for about a quarter of the city’s employment, and many of its agencies continue to maintain lenient telework policies. Politico reports that the city has the highest work-from-home rate in the nation, and the Wall Street Journal notes that Washington’s office vacancy rate is now roughly 20 percent, a record. About half of federal employees engage in telework.
And Washington is hardly the only place in which federal workplace decisions have major effects; in communities across the map — from Houston County, Ga., to San Antonio to Ogden, Utah — federal civilian employees represent a large share of local workers.
Federal jobs typically attract well-educated workers willing to sacrifice private-sector-size paychecks for professional stability, work-life balance and the gratification that comes with public service.
Work-from-home advocates argue that federal agencies need liberal telework policies to hire and retain talent. But valuable — and sometimes serendipitous — office interaction is lost when colleagues see each other only on a computer screen. It can be more difficult for employers to inculcate values and for workers to learn from one another. Research suggests that workers who do their jobs remotely generate fewer new ideas, leading to less innovation.
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End of carouselAlso on the Editorial Board’s agenda
- The misery of Belarus’s political prisoners should not be ignored.
- Biden has a new border plan.
- The United States should keep the pressure on Nicaragua.
- America’s fight against inflation isn’t over.
- The Taliban has doubled down on the repression of women.
- The world’s ice is melting quickly.
Ihar Losik, one of hundreds of young people unjustly jailed in Belarus for opposing Alexander Lukashenko’s dictatorship, attempted suicide but was saved and sent to a prison medical unit, according to the human rights group Viasna. Losik, 30, a blogger who led a popular Telegram channel, was arrested in 2020 and is serving a 15-year prison term on charges of “organizing riots” and “incitement to hatred.” His wife is also a political prisoner. Read more about their struggle — and those of other political prisoners — in a recent editorial.
The Department of Homeland Security has provided details of a plan to prevent a migrant surge along the southern border. The administration would presumptively deny asylum to migrants who failed to seek it in a third country en route — unless they face “an extreme and imminent threat” of rape, kidnapping, torture or murder. Critics allege that this is akin to an illegal Trump-era policy. In fact, President Biden is acting lawfully in response to what was fast becoming an unmanageable flow at the border. Read our most recent editorial on the U.S. asylum system.
Some 222 Nicaraguan political prisoners left that Central American country for the United States in February. President Daniel Ortega released and sent them into exile in a single motion. Nevertheless, it appears that Mr. Ortega let them go under pressure from economic sanctions the United States imposed on his regime when he launched a wave of repression in 2018. The Biden administration should keep the pressure on. Read recent editorials about the situation in Nicaragua.
Inflation remains stubbornly high at 6.4 percent in January. The Federal Reserve’s job is not done in this fight. More interest rate hikes are needed. Read a recent editorial about inflation and the Fed.
Afghanistan’s rulers had promised that barring women from universities was only temporary. But private universities got a letter on Jan. 28 warning them that women are prohibited from taking university entrance examinations. Afghanistan has 140 private universities across 24 provinces, with around 200,000 students. Out of those, some 60,000 to 70,000 are women, the AP reports. Read a recent editorial on women’s rights in Afghanistan.
A new study finds that half the world’s mountain glaciers and ice caps will melt even if global warming is restrained to 1.5 degrees Celsius — which it won’t be. This would feed sea-level rise and imperil water sources for hundreds of millions. Read a recent editorial on how to cope with rising seas, and another on the policies needed to fight climate change.
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As the nation continues a big, unplanned experiment in transforming workplaces, more data will come in on what works. In the meantime, many employers are smartly choosing hybrid work policies, offering employees much more flexibility to work from home than they had before the covid-19 pandemic but still requiring workers to come into the office a few days a week.
Downtown Washington can be more hybrid, too. Even three-days-a-week, return-to-work policies would mean employers would need less office space, so Mayor Muriel E. Bowser is talking about settling 15,000 new residents downtown in the next five years. This would prepare the city for the new workplace reality and combat steep local housing costs.
But even this transformation will not work if federal workers fail to return in greater numbers. Before the pandemic, Washington was booming. Now, decades of progress are at risk.