Telework
The federal government should serve as a model employer. Congressman Sarbanes travels from his home in Towson, Maryland to our nation’s capital each day, tracing the length of his district. He knows first-hand what it is like to sit in the suffocating traffic that pollutes our air and forces families apart for hundreds of hours per year. It is estimated that about one-third of carbon emissions in the United States are transportation-related, yet we embrace workforce management practices that encourage long commutes and excessive travel.
On December 9th, President Obama signed into law the Sarbanes-Wolf-Connolly Telework Enhancement Act of 2010. The new law requires all federal agencies to establish a uniform telework policy, ensuring that most employees who wish to telework are able to do so. The Telework Enhancement Act requires federal agencies to develop training programs for teleworkers and managers, to include telework in continuity of operations plans, and to designate a Telework Managing Officer to lead the telework program at each agency. 
Improved federal telework will not only reduce carbon emissions and traffic gridlock, it will also improve quality of life and recruitment efforts in the federal government and ensure continuity of operations in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster. The best evidence of this was in 2010, when a snowstorm in Washington, DC shut down the government for nearly a week. During that period, federal employees with the ability to telework were able to continue to operate. According to John Berry, the Director of Office of Personnel Management, the federal government saved approximately $30 million per day that would have been otherwise lost.
Telework provides numerous benefits to strengthen our economy and enhance employee work-life balance. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office features a robust telework program and has seen substantial increases in employee productivity and morale since its inception. By implementing an agency-wide telework program, the Patent and Trademark Office has avoided securing $11 million in additional office space and has developed a more competitive recruitment process. Telework now enables the agency to draw from a talent pool of qualified candidates living anywhere in the country.
Good Government and Procurement Reform
Congressman Sarbanes has also authored H.R. 2736, the CLEAN-UP Act, to make a number of common-sense reforms to the federal contracting process. Over the last decade, the federal government has been much too quick to outsource many of government’s most basic functions to the private sector. This has negatively impacted government services from national defense and border security to the collection of taxes and the stewardship of our public lands. In many cases, this work was outsourced with little or no competition — subverting the public interest and wasting billions in taxpayer dollars. This bipartisan legislation seeks to make government procurement more effective by establishing a uniform, government-wide standard for government work, distinguishing between the functions which can and must be done by our civil servants and those functions that may be done competently by the private sector.
