Many Workers Don't Want To Return to the Office. That Could Help Shrink the Government.
Remote work is a plus for many people and businesses, but that’s not necessarily true of D.C.
Echoing many business executives across the United States, returning President Donald Trump—with the backing of efficiency czars Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—wants federal workers back in the office after several years of remote work spurred by the pandemic. For private employers, this will likely continue to be an uphill battle, given that lots of workers say they'd rather quit than return to old in-person work practices. But an incoming administration that wants to streamline the federal government may find that stubborn employees committed to working remotely ease the path to reducing payroll.
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Come Back or You're Fired
"If people don't come back to work, come back into the office, they're going to be dismissed," Trump commented last month, referring to federal workers who've grown accustomed to working from home in the years since COVID-19 shuttered many offices.
Many private sector workers have also grown used to living and working far from their employers' offices. In many cases, they do so with their bosses' endorsement—some companies find employees to be happier with greater flexibility, and overhead to be lower with reduced need for office space.
"Professional, scientific, and technical services, information, finance and insurance, and management of companies and enterprises had over 39 percent of their workforce working remotely in 2021 compared with less than 17 percent in 2019," the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported in October. Across 61 industries, a 1 percent increase in the percentage of remote workers resulted in a 0.08 percentage-point increase in productivity, according to the BLS.
Other firms, though, find that productivity and accountability suffer when employees don't warm seats on-site. What works for some doesn't work for others.
"Large companies are cracking down on back-to-office policies, which will be in the spotlight again for C-suite leaders in the year ahead," Jennifer Williams of The Wall Street Journal noted last month. "AT&T, Amazon.com and Dell Technologies in recent months have called certain staffers back to offices five days a week. Starbucks in October warned employees they risk termination if they don't comply with the company's existing three-days-a-week mandate."
That a few employers have said this for years is an indication of resistance in the ranks at many firms to returning to the office. Some workers moved far from the expensive cities where they once did their jobs, others were hired under circumstances where geographical separation between employer and worker was a given, and several years of altered habits have created a new norm for getting work done.
Many Employers Have Had To Learn To Adapt
"More than 40 percent of managers are ignoring employees refusing to come in as many days as requested," Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University's Institute for Economic Policy Research commented in June 2022. "Many of them have quietly confided to me if their employees are getting their jobs done, they are not enforcing aggressive return-to-the-office policies."
That's just as well for employers who want to keep their employees working.
Among employed adults working from home, 46 percent "say that if their employer no longer allowed them to work from home, they would be unlikely to stay at their current job," Pew Research found in a recent survey. "This includes 26% who say they'd be very unlikely to stay." Thirty-six percent said they'd likely stay at their job if forced to return to the office, and 17 percent were noncommittal.
Women and workers younger than 50 are the most likely to pick quitting over returning to the office, at about half of each. About a third of each group said they'd stay, and smaller shares remained unsure.
This poses serious problems for employers trying to return to a traditional office culture without suffering disruption in the workplace. But it's also an opportunity for a new president and his aides who've announced plans to cut the cost of government to reduce the ranks of federal employees.
A Low-Friction Means To Reduce the Workforce
"Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited," Musk and Ramaswamy, co-heads of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), wrote in a November op-ed. "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."
Venture capitalist and DOGE supporter Marc Andreessen endorses this approach, complaining, "the Washington, DC federal government complex is basically a ghost town" with so many government employees semi-permanently at home.
Andreessen refers to reports that federal buildings sit empty or nearly so. A Government Accountability Office report found that "on average, 17 of the 24 agencies surveyed used 25 percent or less of the available space in their headquarters buildings," as Reason's Joe Lancaster reported in 2023.
Last month, Sen. Joni Ernst (R–Iowa) released her own report finding "government buildings average an occupancy rate of 12 percent." In addition, "the government also owns 7,697 vacant buildings and another 2,265 that are partially empty." Ernst claims many remote-working government employees collect pay based on living in high-cost localities near their offices, even though they've long since relocated to less-expensive digs. "Bureaucrats have been found in a bubble bath, on the golf course, running their own business, and even getting busted doing crime while on taxpayers' time," she added.
Given that DOGE has only advisory power, convincing the new administration to impose a return-to-office mandate might be the easiest way to scrape off significant numbers of employees who, as Pew put it, "say that if their employer no longer allowed them to work from home, they would be unlikely to stay at their current job." If federal workers are anywhere near as resistant to returning to the office as the population in general, it wouldn't be difficult to reduce the government workforce. Then, maybe, the feds could unload some unneeded and expensive office space.
Whether remote work is a boon to any given business or a productivity killer undoubtedly depends on both the company and its workers. There's no one-size-fits-all answer, and employers and employees should be free to sort themselves according to what works for them.
But if calling workers back to the office can shrink the size and cost of government with minimal muss and fuss, that's one change that should be imposed on federal agencies across the board.
