HHS Employees Sort Out Return-to-Office Mandate

Employees at HHS and its various sub-agencies are struggling to figure out how to implement President Donald Trump’s executive order requiring them to report in-person to their work sites full-time, and how the changes will affect them.

An Early Executive Order

The in-person work requirement was outlined in an executive order signed by President Trump on January 20, his first day in office. The two-paragraph order stated that “Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.”

The order was further explained in a January 27 memo to agency heads from both the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). That memo directed agency heads to submit no later than February 7 plans that will “describe the steps the agency will take to revise telework agreements for all eligible employees including major milestones for implementation” and “provide timelines for the return of all eligible employees to in-person work as expeditiously as possible.” Agencies must also explain their plans for getting those who are working remotely full-time back to the office, especially those who live more than 50 miles from their duty stations, and outline any exceptions they intend to grant.

Trump is not alone in his antipathy to teleworking for federal workers. Last December, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) released a report stating that only 6% of federal workers were in the office full-time; the report was titled “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings.” Ernst’s percentage was very much at odds with a 2024 OMB report — which has since been removed from the OMB website — that found that 54% of federal employees work in the office full-time, while the other 46% of the federal workforce is telework eligible, according to a story on the Meritalk website. Only 10% of federal employees – 228,000 people – are in fully remote jobs.

Generally Popular With Both Parties

Overall, however, telework actually has been popular on both sides of the aisle, Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, said last month on a phone call with reporters: “There has been bipartisan support for telework in the federal space for many, many years, because it’s been shown to — when well-applied — provide both for better performance and improved ability to recruit the best talent for federal positions.” The Partnership for Public Service says its aim is to build “a better government and a stronger democracy.”

In the post-pandemic period, “there’s obviously been a push to try to move people in the federal space back into the office,” Stier continued. “The Biden administration actually pushed aggressively to try to make that happen. … Some organizations like the Patent and Trademark Office have been high performing virtually exclusively. … We know it’s really important to understand that you have those [telework] components that have been working very well, even pre-pandemic, and you wouldn’t want to disrupt them, because that would have very negative consequences for the American people.”

The in-office order comes as the General Services Administration announced plans to significantly reduce the federal government’s real estate footprint. “One of the things that our government has become is more efficient with respect to cost, in terms of its physical footprint, as a result of increased use of telework and remote work,” said Stier. “So those things do run in conflict with each other, and certainly it’s so important to understand the transition needs of any organization.”

Like everyone else in the federal workforce, HHS’s more than 80,000 employees — several of whom spoke to MedPage Today on condition of anonymity — are trying to figure out how the back-to-work order will be implemented in their specific situation. The agency consists of workers assigned to the HHS headquarters office in Washington as well as 10 regional offices spread throughout the U.S., and lingering logistical questions remain. Some who have previously worked at the Washington headquarters, for example, say there is likely not enough interior space or parking to accommodate all of the employees if everyone now assigned there were to return full-time.

One employee working in a different location said they had heard that supervisors were going to have to return to work full-time sooner than non-supervisory employees, and that there might still be some “ad hoc” telework agreements. There may not be enough space for everyone to be in their building, the employee said.

Still another employee said that their colleagues were “none too pleased” to hear about the back-to-office-full-time requirement, noting that the rule appeared to supersede other arrangements in which people could, for instance, work four 10-hour days and get the fifth day off. “This is an imperious, dictatorial, tin-ear approach to management,” the person said. “It’s not about efficiency; it’s just about vindictiveness. There are ways to achieve the overall goal of serving the American people well, but this is not that.”

Changes to Work/Life Balance

With this change, “people’s work/life balance is about to be completely tipped over,” the person continued. They noted that “the flexibility of remote work allowed them to create lives where they were much more productive as parents and still got their work done; if they had to do a carpool at 3 p.m., they could do that and work into the evening. I would get emails from people who were still working at 7 or 8 p.m. But you can’t do that if you’re in the office 5 days a week with inflexible workplace rules.”

Another employee said that telework made it easier to work longer hours when necessary. Before telework, “it would take me an hour to get into work in the morning and maybe 90 minutes or longer to get home in the afternoon,” they said, explaining that they worked a 7 a.m.-to-3:30 p.m. shift. But with telework, “I could work before 7 or after 3:30, and that has happened commonly — things come up and require more than just the 8 hours that you do on Monday through Friday.”

One thing that might affect whether and when HHS employees return to the office full-time is any collective bargaining agreements that employee unions have with the federal government. “In the OPM memo, they indicated that there were some issues that need to be resolved through the collective bargaining process before employees that were represented by the unions could actually return to the office,” the employee added. Several unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union, represent different swaths of HHS employees.

Kristina Fiore contributed reporting to this story.

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