For many Americans, the coronavirus pandemic has receded into the past. But it wrought some lasting changes on the nation’s workforce — a point Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley described at a Jan. 2 town hall in Rye, New Hampshire.
Haley criticized the size of the federal budget and said some of the federal government’s duties can be shifted to the states. "Do you know right now over 70% of federal employees are still working from home three years after COVID?" she said.
Haley repeated the statistic Jan. 4 during a CNN town hall in Des Moines, Iowa.
Haley’s campaign confirmed that this data point came from a recently released annual study by the Office of Personnel Management, the agency that handles the federal government’s human resources.
However, the 70% figure misleads by leaving out important information: Only half of that figure involves people who said they worked remotely most or all of the workweek. The other half consists of employees who work two days or less per week from home, including some who do so "rarely."
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