Political Quotes

“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.…”