Telework Improvements Act of 2010

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. WITTMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank Ranking Member Issa for his great work on this bill. I appreciate your words and Congressman Wolf's words concerning the things that we need to do. Telework is a nonpartisan issue. It just make sense. It's how do we create efficiencies? And these days we want to be able to do more with less in what is definitely a resource-challenged environment.

Despite the fact there are numerous benefits of teleworking, such as reduced traffic congestion and reduced energy consumption, cost savings, competitive hiring and retention, and emergency preparedness, as we saw during the snowstorm, many Federal agencies continue to underutilize telework. And this bill is going to help ensure that Federal employees who are eligible to telework are able to do so without diminishing agency operations and performance.

Under this legislation, Federal employees handling classified information, though, would not be eligible to telework. And folks, that's a group of people that we are missing out on. There's a great opportunity there to bring those folks that work in secure networks to the table to participate in telework. And I offered an amendment that was rejected by the Rules Committee that would have required the Office of Personnel Management to report on the status of any programs for teleworking by Federal employees whose primary duties require access to secure networks, and to identify at least two sites for a possible teleworking pilot program. And I look forward in the future to working with my colleagues to further explore the potential for secure teleworking.

We all know in this region there are a number of agencies that have their employees working on secure networks. We ought to make sure we are looking at bringing those folks in. We saw during the snowstorm $30 million of efficiency we picked up during that period of time. So this truly is a nonpartisan issue of looking at increased efficiencies. We ought to be looking across the board at all the ways that we can lift telework up, make it available for every different aspect of Federal work operations to make sure we are doing all we can to increase efficiencies, folks. And this is entirely possible.

We have had conversations with folks within the agencies. They are ready, willing, and able to pursue this. We need to give them the mechanism to get this done. The desire is there. The need is there. Whenever we match

those two together, we have the ability to get this done. So again, this is a nonpartisan issue. I urge all of my colleagues to vote in favor of this, and let this be the first step to making sure we have telework as an opportunity for the entire Federal workforce.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source