No. of Recommendations: 7
Welp, the ones who are theoretically going in…aren’t. The EPA building thing is pretty damning.There's no link to the actual audit, so it's hard to really assess those claims.
A quick google search finds that the contamination at the EPA building was found as part of broad scale water testing by GSA of more than a thousand federal buildings. There are
lots of things that can cause Legionella contamination - not just stagnation - and regular maintenance of a building should prevent Legionella even if the building is being underutilized. Plus, there's no way of knowing whether this is the result of current utilization rates or a contamination problem caused from the months when nearly every office building was completely shut down, and just wasn't remedied:
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-ener...There's no doubt that federal office buildings, like
most office buildings, are currently underutilized. Remote work has dramatically altered office work environments, both federally and in the private sector. But most federal employees don't work in office buildings, and nearly all of the ones that do are on hybrid schedules. Again, like many (most?) private-sector office workers. There's no information in the article about the
extent to which the ones who are theoretically going in aren't going in - just anecdotes. And, as noted above, no link to the audit, so no way to see what that figure actually is - but the OMB study from a few months ago put the proportion of on-site hours by remote-eligible workers at 60%.
