President-elect Donald Trump warned federal employees last week that they must return to the office – or else “they’re going to be dismissed.”
The threat was the latest and loudest signal yet that Trump, his allies and Republicans in Congress are committed to ending a remote-work culture that became widespread for the civil service of 2.3 million during the coronavirus pandemic but that many conservatives now decry as an outdated taxpayer-funded perk that has hurt performance across the government.
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A quick return to pre-pandemic – or even stricter – federal office policies is not likely to happen with the stroke of a presidential pen.
Trump’s expected return-to-office mandate faces furious resistance from federal employees, many of whom are covered by union agreements that guarantee work-from-home policies – including some contracts extended in recent weeks by outgoing Biden officials eager to blunt Trump’s impact on the workforce.
About 56 percent of the civil service is covered by collective bargaining contracts, many of which include provisions for telework, according to federal data and union officials. A record 10 percent of federal jobs now are designated as fully “remote,” with the official workplace an employee’s home or rented space far from an agency headquarters or regional office. The General Services Administration, which manages federal buildings, has also moved aggressively in recent years to shed costly excess office space as Biden officials kept pandemic policies in place.
“It’s in a lot of labor contracts,” Cathie McQuiston, deputy general counsel at the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest union representing federal workers, said of the telework arrangements. “And at a lot of these agencies, the reality is, they don’t have the place to put people to force them back five days a week.”
Return-to-office mandates will be a huge expense for the incoming Trump administration, and will undercut its goal of slashing the federal budget, McQuiston predicted.
The looming battle with the country’s largest employer could be a test case for the resistance Trump will face in his ambitious plan to disrupt and remake the nonpartisan civil service. He has pledged to fire wide swaths of career employees and replace them with political loyalists, to close entire departments and move others out of Washington, and to dilute the power of federal employee unions.
Even as it races to extend work-from-home agreements before Trump assumes office Jan. 20, the AFGE last week told its own employees that as of January, workers at its D.C. headquarters will be allowed to telework for only two days in each two-week pay period, down from five days per pay period this year.
The new return-to-office mandate, ordered by national president Everett Kelley, is designed to ensure that the staff is fully prepared to tackle an onslaught of Trump policies targeting the federal workforce, spokesman Andrew Huddleston said.
“AFGE embraces a work environment that includes full in-person, alternate work schedules, telework, and full remote work to best serve the needs of our members and staff,” Brittany Holder, another union spokeswoman, said in an email. The AFGE represents about 750,000 federal employees.
At federal agencies, some departments have already rescinded work-from-home agreements, anticipating that Trump will take action soon after he assumes office. Employees, many of whom were hired during and after pandemic restrictions and have never worked in the office five days a week, are assessing whether they can adjust child care and commuting schedules or quit.
If the return-to-office plans do lead to a slew of departures, that would fit into the plans of tech moguls Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are seeking to shrink the workforce through their “Department of Government Efficiency,” a nongovernmental advisory panel.
“You don’t even have to talk about you’re in a mass firing, a mass exodus,” Ramaswamy said days after the election on Tucker Carlson’s show. “Just tell them they have to come back five days a week from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.”
Trump’s transition team referred a request for details on return-to-office plans to his public comments last week.
The federal government’s gradual embrace of telework began years before the pandemic.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, based in Alexandria, Virginia, adopted a remote-work policy for patent examiners as far back as 1997 to recruit top talent from all over the country. Under President Barack Obama, some offices began limited telework to cut down on traffic and car emissions.
In his first term, Trump began to scale back existing telework as some members of his Cabinet suggested that employees were slacking off at home. Then the pandemic sent about half the workforce home, with the rest remaining on-site performing vital jobs such as serving veterans and air travelers and inspecting meat and mines.
President Joe Biden declared an official end to the public health emergency in 2023. But by then, private companies allowed flexible work, and the government followed suit – even as the downsides of empty offices in D.C. and other downtowns became painfully obvious and inspired some Democrats to join calls to dial back the policies. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) found common ground with congressional Republicans in pushing for a mandate that federal workers return to downtown.
No mandate came, even as Biden issued several directives aimed at coaxing more federal employees back to the workplace. Managers trickled into many offices, but the administration was loath to alienate unions whose contracts had negotiated agreements allowing telework anywhere from one to five days a week.
Federal employees and the unions that represent them argue that telework benefits the government by making hiring and employee benefits more competitive with private companies. They say working from home improves productivity.
But conservatives and other critics of telework point to vast unused government office space that taxpayers are subsidizing and claims that performance has declined in many customer-facing agencies. At the Social Security Administration, in-person staff has thinned in many field offices that offer walk-in service to the public, although the agency says the at-home workers are processing retirement and disability benefit applications.
The debate over whether the federal government should return to the office has opened another front in a culture war defined by partisan politics and privilege. A growing number of companies are pressuring their workers to come back, even as research shows that mandates result in departures and struggles with hiring and retention. In labor force polls, employees cite flexible work as a priority.
As parts of the labor force shifted to flexible work following the pandemic, 73 percent of U.S. adults believed that remote workers were just as or more productive, a Gallup poll released in 2023 found. But partisanship does seem to play a role: A substantial minority of Republicans – 42 percent – said remote workers are less productive than in-person workers, compared with just 23 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats who said the same.
In March 2023, House Republicans were furious after Kiran Ahuja, then the director of the Office of Personnel Management, could not say at a committee hearing how many federal employees were working on-site.
“It was a turning point for members,” said a senior Republican congressional aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. “Each agency was doing their own thing and catering to the workforce.”
Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, is now one of several members of Congress to author bills that would mandate a return to office.
“The pandemic is long over, and it is past time for the federal workforce to return to in-person work,” Comer said in a statement, adding that the Biden administration never provided evidence that pandemic-era telework didn’t harm service.
“On the contrary, the evidence suggests that Americans have suffered under these lenient telework policies,” the congressman said.
Other GOP lawmakers have introduced bills mandating that chronically “absent” employees be seen in their office chairs, and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who leads a caucus aligned with Musk and Ramaswamy’s commission, said this month that she tracked down “bureaucrats relaxing in bubble baths, playing golf, getting arrested, and doing just about everything besides their jobs.”
Telework’s effect on productivity has been elusive, along with data on how many federal workers come into the office and when. Further complicating the task for the incoming Trump administration, a report issued in November by the Government Accountability Office, the research arm of Congress, found that the government isn’t doing enough to measure how telework is affecting its operations and performance.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said last week that just 1 percent of employees come to the office, appearing to cite a report on telework released by Ernst. But that number conflicts drastically with a congressionally mandated report issued in August by the Office of Management and Budget, which found that federal employees who were eligible for telework were still spending more than 60 percent of their work hours on-site. As of May, the report said, 1.1 million were eligible for some amount of remote work and about 228,000 for entirely home-based roles.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D), whose Northern Virginia district includes tens of thousands of federal employees, said he is open to ending the “remote-working phase of the pandemic” that has continued well past the crisis. But he said telework policies should be evaluated in a “reasonable and balanced way,” not as a blanket mandate in the other direction.
“They’ve made this a symbol of the fat, bloated bureaucrat,” Connolly, set to be the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said of Republicans.
Trump’s comments this week were apparently prompted by the discovery that days before leaving office, Biden’s Social Security commissioner signed a five-year extension of work-from-home privileges with the AFGE, covering 42,000 employees.
“They just signed this thing,” Trump said. “It’s ridiculous. So it was like a gift to a union, and we’re going to obviously be in court to stop it.”
It’s not clear how the incoming administration will seek to implement return-to-work mandates. Legislation would probably clear the House, but it would need 60 votes in the Senate, which would require some Democratic support. Trump could issue an executive order or leave his agency leaders to call employees back.
Those options could work for managers and others who aren’t covered by a union contract guaranteeing hybrid or full-time remote jobs, according to attorneys who specialize in civil service law.
“The bottom line from a legal standpoint is that absent a [union contract], it would be relatively easy for any administration to cancel these agreements because it’s a management right,” said Kevin Owen, a Washington-area employment lawyer whose clients are predominantly civil servants.
Federal workers who refuse to return to the office could be suspended and eventually fired, as could those hired to work remotely if their newly assigned office is within 50 miles of their home, Owen said. The government could pay relocation costs in some circumstances.
But the new administration will face much more significant obstacles at agencies where union contracts guarantee some sort of work-from-home arrangement. Breaching an existing contract is a violation of labor law, attorneys said. But Trump transition officials have indicated a willingness to take actions without precedents and face the legal repercussions.
“These folks have not shown a propensity for honoring the rule of law in many circumstances,” said McQuiston, of the AFGE.
Another challenge that could delay a mandate at some agencies is a lack of space for employees to work. According to the report issued by the OMB in August, departments including the U.S. Agency for International Development, Justice, Veterans Affairs, Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service and the Environmental Protection Agency have reduced their real estate footprints since the pandemic emergency ended – and plan to shed still more square footage, with officials citing low employee occupancy as a prime factor.
It’s unclear whether these agencies have enough space to accommodate employees returning to the office as they aggressively review their needs and project further space reductions, in some cases accompanied by redesigns. A spokeswoman for the General Services Administration said that information is up to each agency to determine and referred a reporter to an August memo from OMB with guidance to federal leaders on optimizing their agencies’ leased and owned office space. The memo called for an occupancy target of at least 60 percent.
At some federal offices with space shortages now, many employees share desks because they are not at work on the same days.
And early this month, the GSA announced that it has begun the process of disposing of an additional 1.5 million square feet of unused federal office space in eight states, from Vermont to Oregon. GSA officials have said their goal is a reduction of more than 6 million square feet of unused space.
The Trump administration may be able to recoup some of this space for a cost – or decide that enough employees will leave government that the space won’t be needed at all.
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