The Federal RTO Edict: Deadlines, Details, Data and Dissention

The clock is winding down on U.S. federal government workers’ ability to work from home.

In a memo sent Wednesday, Jan. 22, to the leaders of U.S. departments and agencies, Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), laid out formal plans and a deadline to immediately return employees back to the office on a full-time basis.

Ezell’s “Guidance on Presidential Memorandum Return to In-Person Work” mobilized strategies called out in one of President Donald Trump’s official Day 1 actions on Monday, Jan. 20.

The memo specifically ordered department/agency leaders to revise organizational workplace policies created under the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010. In its place, the memo stated, “eligible employees must work full time at their respective duty stations unless excused due to a disability, qualifying medical condition or other compelling reason certified by the agency head and the employee’s supervisor.”

Leaders were told to implement changes by 5 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 24. However, a target date of “approximately 30 days” was set for all federal entities to be in full compliance with the return-to-office (RTO) edict.

“President Trump was elected with the mandate to increase the efficiency and accountability of the federal workforce. A glaring roadblock is that most federal offices presently are virtually abandoned,” Ezell wrote. “The vast majority of federal office workers have not returned to in-person work, even though the COVID-19 pandemic ended years ago. Many federal office workers never show up to the federal worksite at all. Federal office buildings sit mostly empty, particularly Washington, D.C.-area agency headquarters offices, devastating the local economy and serving as a national embarrassment. Virtually unrestricted telework has led to poorer government services and made it more difficult to supervise and train government workers. Fairness requires that federal office employees show up to the worksite each day like most other American workers.”

Flexible Workplace Prevalence in the U.S.

Based on Ezell’s quote, what is the state of flexible workplace arrangements in the U.S.?

A September 2022 research report by McKinsey showed 58% of surveyed American workers (spanning all industry sectors) had the option to work from home for all or part of the week. A March 2023 data report from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics showed 27.5% of private-sector employees had employees teleworking some or all the time. According to WorldatWork’s 2024 Total Rewards Inventory of Programs and Practices, association research found: “Remote and hybrid work have firmly established themselves, with 78% of participants [all U.S. based] reporting these as their primary work arrangements. A hybrid model where employees work from the office two to three days per week was the most prevalent, reported by 31% of participating organizations.”

The Ezell memo also called out federal unions as problematic in efforts to address workplace efficiency.

“In addition, during the Biden administration, federal unions attempted to abuse the collective bargaining process to guarantee full-time telework into the indefinite future and forestall any requirement to return to the office,” Ezell wrote.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) clapped back at the new administration’s workplace restrictions, calling telework “an important tool for agencies’ operational efficiency” and characterizing any actions as a solution to a nonexistent problem.

A post on the AFGE website quoted organization president Everett Kelley as saying, “To justify this backward action, lawmakers and members of President Trump’s transition team have spent months exaggerating the number of federal employees who telework and accusing those who do of failing to perform the duties of their jobs. The truth is that less than half of all federal jobs are eligible for telework, and the workers who are eligible to telework still spend most of their work hours at their regular duty stations.”

Flexible Workplace Prevalence in Federal Jobs

On his inauguration day, Trump cited a report by Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst and stated only 6% of federal employees currently work in person. However, federal unions said that report was based on a non-scientific survey of approximately 6,500 federal workers. A link to that report on Sen. Ernst’s website has been deactivated.

The OPM’s own study on internal telework showed a much less dire situation. The “OMB Report to Congress on Telework,” published in August 2024, found 54% of the 2.28 million civilian workers employed by the federal government work entirely in person; the remaining 46% of workers had jobs that were telework-eligible. The agency document stated just 10% of all the jobs were specifically telework positions with no expectation of on-site work.

The 2024 OPM report stated: “Agencies maintain many different postures to best accomplish their work, ranging from situating roving mobile workers in the field to employees working 100% of the time in-person at a secure facility and every conceivable arrangement in between. Agency real estate portfolios follow from these decisions and are similarly composed of many different types of owned and leased facilities in communities all over the country, employed for different uses, from manufacturing to scientific research to traditional office work. Even prior to the pandemic, agencies have also long offered telework flexibilities to the approximately half of federal employees that are eligible to telework to improve agency operations and align the federal workplace to market norms across the economy.”

AFGE stated it will examine the mandate and its implementation before deciding whether to file a lawsuit for collective bargaining agreement violations.

“If they violate our contracts, we will take appropriate action to uphold our rights,” the organization said in its Jan. 22 post.

The verbiage in the Ezell memo shows the OPM is firm in the new RTO approach.

“[The action of the new administration] reflects a simple reality,” he wrote. “The only way to get employees back to the office is to adopt a centralized policy requiring return-to-work for all agencies across the federal government. Seeking to cajole individual agencies to try to get employees to return to the worksite has not succeeded.”

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