Trump’s Return-To-Office Mandate Faces Pushback

Just hours after he was sworn into office, President Donald Trump ordered all federal employees back to the office. 

Trump’s executive order directs agency and department heads to “terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis.”

It says the move should take place “as soon as practicable” and that department and agency heads “shall make exemptions they deem necessary.”

The decision to make this one of his Day 1 actions makes it clear the return-to-office push is a priority for Trump. 

What is less clear is exactly how this push will play out with a federal workforce that has resisted being forced back to the office. 

The nation’s largest federal employee union, the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 800,000 D.C. and federal workers, pushed back against the executive order in a statement Monday night, calling the move a “backward action” that reverses more than a decade of precedent of hybrid work. 

“Rather than undoing decades of progress in workplace policies that have benefited both employees and their employers, I encourage the Trump administration to rethink its approach and focus on what it can do to make government programs work better for the American people,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in the statement. 

Kelley highlighted various benefits of hybrid work, including disaster preparedness, operational efficiency, recruitment and retention, and the ability to allow the federal government to shed unused office space. 

Kelley said that due to consolidating and shedding federal office space, “There may no longer be enough office space to accommodate an influx of on-site workers.” 

Twenty-nine percent of government employees are protected by union collective bargaining agreements, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Some of those unions reached agreements with their agencies during the Biden administration to enshrine remote work arrangements. The AFGE chapter representing 42,000 Social Security Administration workers reached an agreement in December to lock in telework policies until 2029. 

Michael Fallings, a federal employment attorney with law firm Tully Rinckey, told Bisnow Thursday those agreements should protect federal workers represented by those unions from the return-to-office mandate. 

“I don't believe [the executive order] can supersede a union contract,” Fallings said.

“Those employees who have collective bargaining agreements to allow them to work remotely, it should not impact them,” he added.

The goal of the directive is to make employees resign, Fallings said. 

“They’re trying to remove employees. I think that’s been the overall goal, to kind of reduce the size of the federal government,” he said.

Elon Musk, the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, indicated in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in November that this would be a preferred outcome for the administration. 

“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week 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,” Musk wrote in the op-ed along with Vivek Ramaswamy, who departed his role at DOGE on Monday.

Telework had been a feature of the federal workforce even before the pandemic. The bipartisan Telework Enhancement Act in 2010 led to many agencies implementing telework policies, according to the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that advocates for government workers. 

“While many questions remain about how that executive order will be implemented, telework and remote work are management tools used in the private sector to attract and retain top talent, and government can and should do the same,” the Partnership for Public Service wrote in a statement Monday. 

The Biden administration made multiple attempts to increase in-person work across agencies. But his guidance to agency and department heads didn't appear to have a widespread effect on bringing workers back more often. 

It is unclear if Trump's executive order will have more teeth, and it is likely to be challenged in courts, experts told Bisnow. But Trump signing the executive order on Day 1 signals he is interested in taking on the fight. 

“This certainly indicates the position of the administration and where they would like to go. I think what it does, it leads to more questions in terms of exactly what this looks like, how long it takes, who’s affected by it and what the ultimate outcome is going to be,” said Cushman & Wakefield Executive Chairman Darian LeBlanc, a top government leasing broker. 

“It’s a pretty aggressive stance, and it may be [that] six months from now, everybody is working in the office five days a week,” Lucy Kitchin, who leads Transwestern's government services advisory group, told Bisnow. “It just kind of remains to be seen where we land on this.” 

While some federal telework policies have been in place for more than a decade, hybrid work became more prominent among federal employees when the pandemic began nearly five years ago. 

As for the state of the federal workforce, the most recent report from the Office of Management and Budget in August found that for the 24 agencies it surveyed, 54% of employees were in person full time and 10% were fully remote. The remote-eligible employees spend about 61% of their time in person. The study took place over two pay periods last May. 

The shift to more remote work over the past five years has led to even more vacant space in federally leased and owned buildings that were already underutilized prior to the pandemic. As a result, the General Services Administration has ramped up its efforts to offload federal property and shrink leases when they come up for renewal. 

The changes in the workforce dynamic have additionally had impacts on the vibrancy of D.C.’s downtown and federal-heavy corridors. The federal workforce makes up 30% of all District employees, according to JLL, and the federal government is the largest occupier of office space in the region, according to CBRE.

“Obviously, if all employees come back to the office tomorrow, it will be great not just for the office market but for the retail market, WMATA and just for the city in general,” Kitchin said.

If federal employees come back to the office in full force like the executive order dictates, agencies may need to lease more space to accommodate them.

“If all of the people come back to office, which hasn't been done since even before the pandemic for quite some time, that might represent some opportunity for growth in the market,” Kitchin said.

An increase in federal leasing demand in D.C. would represent a reversal after years of the government shrinking its footprint, and it could help push down the city’s 22.5% vacancy rate. 

At the same time, there has been a heightened push to shed federally owned space, an objective experts say has bipartisan support and which the Trump administration is likely to pursue. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the Trump administration is considering selling a substantial share of the federal government’s owned office stock. 

Kitchin expects disposing of federal property to be a Trump administration priority. 

“There seems to be a bipartisan coming together and momentum around this particular issue,” she said. “It will be a process, but I do think it has momentum going into the Trump administration.” 

LeBlanc said the federal portfolio is “hugely challenged” and it is increasingly becoming acknowledged that the federal government isn't an effective owner of real estate.

“I think we will see an uptick in the review and possible disposition of federal assets that are no longer of value to their original mission of housing federal employees,” he told Bisnow.