evidence: Total civilian employment fell by 8.8 million over the year, as the COVID-19 pandemic brought the economic expansion to a sudden halt, taking a tremendous toll on the U.S. labor market. The unemployment rate increased in 2020, surging to 13.0 percent in the second quarter of the year before easing to 6.7 percent in the fourth quarter. Although some people were able to work at home, the numbers of unemployed on temporary layoff, those working part time for economic reasons, and those unemployed for 27 or more weeks increased sharply over the year. [...] In May 2020, shortly after the onset of the pandemic, 35.4 percent of employed people had teleworked or worked from home at any time during the 4 weeks prior to the survey because of the pandemic.23 The share of the employed who teleworked trended down during the rest of the year and had dropped to 23.7 percent by December 2020. [...] 26 See Matthew Dey, Harley Frazis, Mark A. Loewenstein, and Hugette Sun, "Ability to work from home: evidence from two surveys and implications for the labor market in the COVID-19 pandemic," Monthly Labor Review, June 2020, www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/ability-to-work-from-home.htm.