President Donald Trump’s order for all federal workers to return to the office could hit a road bump thanks to the policies of his own government.
On his first day in office, Trump ordered all agencies to end remote work and for employees to return to their in-person duty stations. A January 22 memo from the White House’s Office of Personnel Management gave agencies 30 days to comply with this order.
And with the clock ticking, federal agencies — nor the administration itself — have any idea how they will enforce this due to the lack of space available, The Washington Post reports.
In many offices, federal employees will be “sitting on top of each other,” according to Jack Fingert, a senior adviser to the General Services Administration administrator under former president Barack Obama.
“There are some specific offices where they literally don’t have enough square feet per person,” Fingert told the Post.
A Federal Emergency Management Agency employee told the Post her boss said there’s only room for 60 percent of employees in their current office. They were ordered to telework twice a week even before the COVID-19 pandemic due to these constraints, the employee said.
Others are concerned about traveling several states away on such short notice.
“I don’t know what return to office will mean for me as there is no federal worksite for my agency within hundreds of miles,” a federal employee living on the West Coast told the Post.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have targeted federal buildings for cuts and even terminated leases for three office spaces.
Another issue is that the government doesn’t know exactly how much office space is even available due to a lack of data on office occupancy and capacity, the Post reports.
“Right now we’re kind of like an airplane with no windows and no instruments,” Michael Peters, commissioner of the Public Buildings Service, said at a meeting last week. “We don’t really know what occupancy is.”
Meanwhile, only some 20,000 federal workers have accepted the Trump administration’s offer to resign by Thursday in exchange for a nearly eight-month buyout.
However, an Office of Personnel Management spokesperson previously told The Independent the number is still rising ahead of the deadline Thursday.
The Independent has contacted the White House for comment.
