Federal workers rally near the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 11, urging Congress to protect civil service jobs from political interference. Some workers say the Trump administration's return-to-office mandate has led to chaos. (Moriah Ratner/For The Washington Post)
In the name of DOGE, Trump ordered all federal employees working remotely to return to the office. He said he would fire all who didn't. I am sure his blanket, shoot-from-the-hip mandate looked good on paper. However, like everything Trumpian, the order sounded like a winner on Fox News. But the reality fell short of the propaganda.
Worker efficiency is taking a hit. How this saves money is anyone's guess. Paying for office space for these newly located workers has to be more expensive than having them work from home.
No one in the administration has likely done a cost-benefit analysis on the new work arrangement — basing policy on facts is considered un-Christian, socialist, and gay in MAGAworld — but anecdotally, the results have been sub-optimal.
The cynic, and we should all be cynics now, will say the standard metrics for judging success — business school concepts like organizational efficiency, worker productivity, and group cohesion — are heresy in the 'just break it' philosophy of anti-government crusaders. The administration knew it would be chaos — wanted it to be chaos — and is ecstatic that it is chaos. It is the climax of their Project 2025 wet dream.
Either way, the reader must decide if Trump's goal is to increase efficiency. Or indulge his sadism by derailing and destroying thousands of careers. Judging by the miserable man's record, hurting federal workers makes him happy regardless of whether it was his primary goal or a welcome side benefit.
The Washington Post looked at how 'back to the office' is going. They reported their findings in a piece headlined, "Federal workers are being rushed back to the office. It's causing chaos". First up was FEMA — a plum target for elimination:
As the Federal Emergency Management Agency prepared for its full workforce to report in person this month, it faced a situation many agencies are confronting as they scramble to comply with President Donald Trump's return-to-office mandate: There weren't enough workspaces for everyone.
As a result, employees would have to "share workstations on a rotating basis," the agency announced in guidance shared with employees last week. The guidance, obtained by The Washington Post, stated: "Supervisors will resolve workplace availability conflicts using the following criteria in the order listed below."
Topping the list was "full-time employment status," followed by seniority and pay-scale criteria. But if none of those settled the conflict, supervisors were directed to turn to the sixth item on the list: "flip of a coin."
(Bolding mine)
FEMA employees who cannot score a desk are expected to work in the open spaces in the various wings of FEMA's DC HQ. This arrangement has drawbacks. According to the guidance shared with the staff, the "minimum requirements for an employee workstation" are a work surface, a chair, a power source, and an internet or WiFi connection.
However, when WaPo asked a FEMA employee what kind of work surface people might have in the open wings, the employee responded: "I don't know. That's a wonderful question."
Besides the obvious — it is debilitating to work in a space you cannot call your own — there are privacy issues. The worker added:
"It's just a big open space, which is problematic if you have a job that requires you to do anything confidential."
The worker also outlined the effect on the civil service grunts, whose task is to bring relief to the victims of natural disasters. (Another group whose wounds are targets for Trump's salt). Speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation, they said:
"People are miserable. Everybody is miserable and anxious. It's palpable."
It's not just FEMA. WaPo adds that the Project 2025 vandals are not sparing the military.
A US Navy Department employee in Virginia, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said he was ordered to return to the office Monday. However, because of a lack of space, his team was spread among four buildings, some separated by 30 to 40 miles. "I'm making a 15-minute drive to get paperwork routed," he said. "Some people are making a 45-minute drive."
Paradoxically, even as humanity enters the brave new world of AI, the tech bros spearheading DOGE are returning the federal bureaucracy to the quill pen era. The WaPo piece continues:
But he said his wife, who works for a different Navy command, has it far worse. Her office has 14 working desks for 40 people, he said, so they take turns at the desks and spend the rest of the day killing time and chatting in the halls.
"They're trying to say she can sit in the auditorium and do any work that doesn't require the internet," he said, "which is zero."
Wasting time and gas and working without the internet are not the only issues for Navy employees. There is parking for 5,000 cars at the Navy facility in DC's Navy Yard neighborhood. This week, 17,000 employees had to report in person. To deal with the overflow, the Navy directed some drivers to the Anacostia Metro lot one station away. So now Trump is kicking non-federal commuters looking for a parking spot in the ass.
It's the same story at the DHS headquarters in Southeast DC. US Coast Guard employees newly required to work at the office overtaxed the already-crowded campus parking garage. According to one DHS employee, the garage was full by 8:15, even before every employee had to commute.
There is a sliver of silver lining (he writes sarcastically) — 75,000 federal employees accepted Trump's deferred resignation offer before the clock ran out earlier this week. In addition, 200,000 probationary employees (new hires with less than 2 years on the job) are subject to termination. But, knowing how these things work, expect government office buildings to be either ghost towns or overcrowded. There will be no efficient medium.
In addition, the vandals are also working to terminate leases on federal offices across the country. This national effort brings us to Idaho. The WaPo piece finishes:
A federal worker based in Boise, where she works remotely, said she has been told she'll need to return to the office, but she has no idea what office she'd go to — or what the point would be.
"If I'm in an office space, I don't work with anybody in the office," said the worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, including which agency she works for, to protect her job.
"My bosses are in a different location, our team is all over the West, and it has been that way for decades."
She added: "It's not that people don't want to go to work. There's just no place to go."
Whatever your opinion of the role of government and how big it should be, a 21st-century state requires professional administration. If you run a fraudulent real estate business with a sideline in snake oil, it doesn't matter how amateurish your organization is. But the US is the world's largest economic entity — and home to 335 million people. It takes an experienced and dedicated workforce managed by people capable of doing the job to run it well.
Now the country has morons managing a workforce that has to share desks or sit in hallways twiddling their thumbs because their computers are expensive paperweights.
Eventually, even the oligarchs will realize that autocracy is no place to live. Just ask yourself where Russian plutocrats buy real estate. (Spoiler alert: it is in countries with functioning bureaucracies.)