Trump orders federal workers to return to offices full-time

Author: Raphael Sartre

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday in front of cheering supporters at Capital One Arena in Washington, ordering federal workers to return to their offices five days a week.

The move will force large swaths of white-collar government employees to abandon remote work arrangements, reversing a trend seen in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some Trump allies say the back-to-work order is designed to help weaken the civil service and make it easier for Trump to replace long-serving government workers with loyalists.

In a brief statement posted on the White House website, Trump ordered all department and agency heads to “take all necessary steps to end remote work arrangements as soon as practicable and require employees to return to work in person to perform their respective duties.” Stations, but department and agency heads shall be exempted when deemed necessary.

The return-to-office order, combined with a hiring freeze and the creation of an advisory body called the Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE), is designed to help Trump take significant amounts of money away from the federal government and eliminate some agencies wholesale.

Experts say the overall impact of the changes will be to put frustrated government workers out of work, a goal the Trump team is explicitly pursuing.

Tesla CEO Musk (Chairman of DOGE) recently predicted that revoking the “COVID-era privilege” of telecommuting would trigger “a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”

Not all government workers will be protected. A quarter of the federal workforce is unionized, and many have signed bargaining agreements that allow for remote work or hybrid arrangements.

However, Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), hinted at efforts to unwind the agreements, telling lawmakers that the deals struck during the Joe Biden administration were “a troubling This is a concerning phenomenon and we are considering it.” Very close. “

For decades, Republicans have derided federal workers as lazy bureaucrats. Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement has taken criticism to a new level, with the president calling federal employees “dishonest” and “dishonest.”

People continued to cheer as Trump signed an executive order ordering workers to return to offices. Trump held up the document with a wry smile, and the audience burst into applause.

“Politics is popular with the ‘Let’s MAGA’ crowd because workers who work from home tend to be highly educated,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University who studies labor and management issues.

While Trump and other Republicans say remote working is rampant among federal workers, government data shows it is more limited. About 46% of federal workers, or 1.1 million people, are eligible to work remotely, with about 228,000 working entirely remotely, according to a report released by the White House Office of Management and Budget in August.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the federal employee union, said hybrid work arrangements are a “critical tool” in attracting America’s best workers.

“Restricting the use of hybrid work arrangements will make it more difficult for federal agencies to compete for top talent,” it said in an email.

Bloom said the Trump administration’s efforts to coerce the federal workforce could spark a spate of fights, firings and resignations that could ultimately lead to an overall decline in the quality of government services for Americans and could lead to the failure of core safety and security functions.

“I think the collapse of government services is going to cause a lot of problems,” Bloom said. “May God bless all those who deal with the federal government.”

(Reporting by Raphael Satter. Also reporting by David Shepardson. Editing by Deepa Babington, Anna Driver and Diane Craft)