Posted on Tuesday, September 9, 2025
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by Sarah Katherine Sisk
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1 Comments
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A new report shows that President Donald Trump has delivered on his promise to end the federal government’s work-from-home frenzy, which in many cases saw bureaucrats doing little to no actual work while still collecting a paycheck from taxpayers.
According to a Gallup survey out earlier this month, just 26 percent of federal employees are now fully remote – down from 40 percent in 2022, well after the COVID-19 pandemic had subsided. At the same time, the number of hybrid employees has plummeted from over 60 percent last July to 28 percent, while the share of fully in-person workers has shot up from less than 20 percent last year to 46 percent.
That remarkable turnaround is credited to Trump’s return-to-office mandate. On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to end pandemic-era remote work arrangements and begin moving toward full-time, in-person workplaces, effective March 10.
While some federal employee unions and Democrats have objected to the order, the numbers show that it is achieving its goal and signaling a cultural reset inside the federal bureaucracy.
Throughout the Biden administration, which saw remote work run amok, watchdogs documented widespread abuse of lax telework policies. A June inspector general report found that more than 58 percent of employees failed to meet minimum in-office requirements, while close to 30 percent were working on expired telework agreements. Another 21 percent had paperwork discrepancies. Fifteen percent had no approved telework agreements at all but were still literally phoning it in.
Chuck Ezell, the former Acting Director of the Office of Personnel Management, concluded that under Biden, telework policies were “mismanaged and oversight was virtually nonexistent.”
A report from Sen. Joni Ernst described even more blatant abuses. One Veterans Affairs worker logged into a meeting from his bubble bath. A Housing and Urban Development employee was paid for hours spent in an Oklahoma jail after being arrested for drunk driving. A Social Security staffer ran a side business while teleworking and had his mother and wife log into his federal system to cover his absence. Another federal employee told Ernst that telework was “like being on vacation.”
According to Ernst, only about six percent of federal employees were in the office on a full-time basis under Biden.
The problems went beyond individual misconduct and reflected deeper failures across the bureaucracy. In June 2022, the Functional Government Initiative (FGI) obtained an internal Health and Human Services report showing that, based on VPN data, about 25 percent of HHS employees were not logging into their agency’s software suite on any given day.
These failures to show up had real consequences. In one case, the FDA “lost” a 34-page whistleblower report warning of an impending baby formula shortage, a clear coordination failure in a remote-work environment.
Unsurprisingly, FGI’s review of 24 agencies showed that official leave use plummeted after telework expanded. Annual leave fell by more than 15 percent and sick leave by 30 percent, representing nearly $1.4 billion in base pay. Clearly, workers were enjoying what amounted to vacation time without officially requesting time off.
At the same time, Ernst warned that agencies were locked in a “perverse arms race” to lure employees from each other by offering ever-looser telework policies.
Several major departments, including Interior, Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Housing and Urban Development (HUD), had no system to verify whether remote employees were working at all.
An October 2024 audit from HUD’s inspector general found that nearly 85 percent of employees at the agency had telework agreements and another nine percent were fully remote. While that shift was initially justified during the pandemic, the agency failed to update or properly verify many of those arrangements as the years went on.
The inspector general further flagged that up to 11 percent of telework agreements contained errors, including outdated duty stations, incorrect locality pay designations, and mismatched schedules. Roughly nine percent of the HUD workforce lived more than 50 miles from their assigned duty station, including about 30 staffers who were more than 1,000 miles away. Some were listed as commuting across the United States every week or from the mainland to Hawaii.
HUD had already identified six cases where workers received inflated locality pay based on incorrect information. The inspector general warned that many more employees could be overpaid without stronger verification. Trump’s return-to-office mandate reduced the opportunity for such abuse by requiring employees to report to their official duty stations in person.
Private-sector businesses could never afford the level of unproductivity that became routine inside the federal workforce during the pandemic. A company that paid employees to skip logins, run side businesses on the clock, or join meetings from a bubble bath would quickly go bankrupt. Yet taxpayers were forced to bankroll that dysfunction for years.
That era is ending, and the political symbolism is just as important as the practical gains. After years of empty offices, wasted real estate expenses, and widespread telework abuse, Trump’s order marked a visible break with the bureaucracy’s pandemic-era culture. Instead of accommodating remote perks, the federal government under Trump is putting service to taxpayers first again.
Sarah Katherine Sisk is a proud Hillsdale College alumna and a master’s student in economics at George Mason University. You can follow her on X @SKSisk76.
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