Washington Post – Some members of Congress say they shouldn’t be. “With the number of coronavirus cases increasing across much of the country, leading members of Congress on civil service issues are challenging orders by federal agencies for teleworking federal employees to return to their regular worksites. “I think we have to press the pause button immediately,” Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of the House Government Operations subcommittee, said in an interview. “There is no data that could make one comfortable that it is safe to return fully to work and to the status quo. In fact, all of the data suggest the opposite.” Senators representing Maryland and Virginia will send a letter Thursday morning to the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management warning against premature reopenings that could lead to new coronavirus cases…“Reopening too quickly by ending maximum telework threatens to erase the progress made against the virus and endanger the health and safety of federal employees and everyone else in an agency’s region through increased community spread,” says the letter, signed by Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Mark R. Warner (D-Va.)…”

Jacqueline Simon, policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees, though, testified that “there should be no reopening unless and until federal agencies have the full capacity to test, protect, trace, and inform their workforces, and unless and until genuine, objective data on the status of the pandemic shows it has subsided.”…