- President Donald Trump hit the ground running with a demand for federal employees to go back to the office full-time—that could be a problem for the departments who have more than half their staff working remotely.
President Donald Trump hasn’t even been in the Oval Office a day and he’s already causing a headache for middle managers in federal agencies.
On Jan. 20, President Trump signed an executive order mandating federal employees need to get back to their in-office desks five days a week—a significant change for the thousands of staffers who have worked on a hybrid basis since the pandemic.
This will cause more of a problem for some agencies than others, as currently more than half of some departments work remotely.
As a result, these agencies risk losing a significant chunk of their workforce who may quit over the loss of their sought-after flexible professional arrangements.
This isn’t an outcome that would surprise President Trump or his advisors. In fact, RTO mandates have been floated by Tesla CEO Elon Musk (now sole head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE) as a way to trim headcount.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal alongside his former DOGE co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk said a full-time RTO policy “would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.”
Precisely two months after the WSJ op-ed and the Trump camp has scored a victory against what Musk labels the “laptop class.”
The executive order reads: “Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.”
Impacted departments
For agencies which have been operating with more than half their staff logging on from home, the policy shift could present a significant problem.
Firstly, managers will need to plan where a sudden influx of staffers will even sit—a problem which organizations in the private sector have also faced.
Secondly will be a series of discussions with staff—be they exit interviews, establishing the rare exceptions to the new RTO rule, or answering questions about when the new RTO rule will come into effect.
Agency heads will also be bracing themselves for the possibility that they may have to run their departments with significantly smaller teams—and some agencies risk losing proportionally more of their teams than others.
According to an August 2024 report compiled by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 2,341 of the Department of Education’s 4,245 staff work remotely—that’s more than 55%.
Likewise in the General Services Administration, 49.8% of the nearly 13,000 staff work offsite.
The story is similar at the Small Business Administration, where 48.5% of 6,390 staff work from home, and in the Office of Personnel Management where 1,115 of the 2,753 are remote workers.
While these departments face the biggest upheaval relative to their size, larger departments have more people logging on remotely.
The Department of Defense, for example, has 61,549 remote employees (out of 783,081 total). The Department of Veteran Affairs has 36,630 remote workers (out of 485,139 total) and the Department of Health and Human Services has 26,849 working remotely (out of 91,845 total).
A silver lining in the report is that even departments with a large number of remote workers still see their in-person and hybrid staffers coming in for the majority of the week.
For example while the Department of Agriculture has 18,529 remote employees, those who work in-person or hybrid spend 85% of their working hours in the office.
At the Department of Justice that percentage is 91.4% (excluding 1,653 remote workers) and 85% at the Department of Homeland Security (excluding 15,445 remote staff).
The OMB’s report also features responses from each department on how they are managing performance and office utilization—something which is likely to draw the attention of DOGE.
The Department of Education, for example, measures performance “through a framework that includes planning; internal analysis and review; and reporting”—the metrics of which are the same for both in-person and remote or hybrid staffers.
In terms of office utilization, the Education Department adds that it shares space with the U.S. General Services Administration, writing: “When managing the cost of space reductions [the education department] prioritizes space reductions that can achieve the greatest net financial savings.”
