With an overnight winter storm potentially causing a messy rush hour in the Washington, D.C. metro area, the Office of Personnel Management is telling employees going into the office that they can report two hours late.

OPM said these employees also can take unscheduled leave or unscheduled telework too.

The vast swath of the workforce that’s already teleworking because of COVID-19 is still expected work as usual.

This is the fourth time this month OPM has had to make a weather call, as the Washington metro area is expecting around an inch or two of snow between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. Thursday morning.

Federal News Network’s sister station WTOP said rain will start late Wednesday night, changing over to snow. A cold front will bring a blast of Arctic air into the D.C. region after a relatively mild Wednesday. Those plummeting temperatures, as well as the rain, will make the transition to snow even more difficult for commuters.

Earlier this month, OPM closed federal offices in the National Capital Region twice as winter weather kicked into high gear in 2022.

In its most recent report to Congress, OPM said 50% of the total federal workforce was deemed telework-eligible by their agencies in fiscal 2020, and of those employees, 90% actively teleworked. Overall, 45% of all federal employees teleworked in 2020.

But the office cautioned those relatively outdated figures may not have been an accurate governmentwide snapshot, since agencies were reporting data to OPM at the very same time they were changing telework rules and definitions in response to the pandemic.

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