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President Donald Trump made the exaggerated claim that federal office space is “occupied by 4%” of federal workers to bolster his argument for dramatically downsizing the federal workforce and demanding that most workers return to the office full time.
In fact, more than half of the nearly 2.3 million federal workers are not even eligible to work from home at all, according to an Office of Management and Budget report released in August 2024. As of May of that year, among those eligible to telework for a portion of their hours, 61% of their working hours were spent in-person at assigned job sites. Only 228,000 — about 10% of the federal workforce — were entirely remote.
Since taking office, Trump has taken a hard line on the need for federal workers to return full time to the office, and he has criticized former President Joe Biden’s post-pandemic efforts to push federal workers back to the office. As with the private sector, many employees began working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In his 2022 State of the Union address, Biden vowed, “The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.” A year later, the OMB issued new guidance that called on agencies to “substantially increase meaningful in-person work at Federal offices, particularly at headquarters and equivalents, while still using flexible operational policies as an important tool in talent recruitment and retention.”
There was a modest decrease in the percentage of federal employees who worked remotely on a “routine or situational” basis between the fiscal years of 2022 and 2023 (from 46% to 43%), according to the Office of Personnel Management. Biden’s chief of staff, Jeffrey Zients, acknowledged in an April 2024 speech at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., “We don’t yet have the return-to-work levels that we should have across the federal government. We’re headed in the right direction, but that’s an – that’s an area we need to continue to focus on.”
Meanwhile, a 2023 review by the Government Accountability Office of 24 federal agency headquarters buildings in and around Washington, D.C., found that from January to March of 2023, 17 of them were at 25% capacity or less earlier that year. (The vast majority of federal workers don’t work in the Washington, D.C., area.)
In November, Biden’s then-Social Security Administration commissioner, Martin O’Malley, reached a deal with the American Federation of Government Employees that would permit 42,000 Social Security Administration employees to continue to work a hybrid schedule that allows them to work at least some time from home until 2029.
Trump referred to that deal in his remarks to the press while signing executive orders on Feb. 11.
“What we’re trying to do is reduce government,” Trump said. “We have too many people. We have office space, it’s occupied by 4%. Nobody’s showing up to work because they were told not to. And then Biden gave them a five-year pass, some of them, 48,000 of them gave them a five-year pass, that for five years, you don’t have to show up to work.”
It’s not true that all of those workers in the bargaining agreement “don’t have to show up to work,” if Trump meant they don’t have to show up at the office at all. The deal was for hybrid work schedules.
On his first day in office, Trump issued a memo instructing the heads of all federal departments and agencies to “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.”
White House Cites Nonscientific Survey
We reached out to the White House for clarification and backup for Trump’s claim that federal buildings were only occupied by 4% of federal workers, but we did not get a response. However, a White House fact sheet on Trump’s efforts to “Remake America’s Federal Workforce,” states, “According to a recent congressional report, only 6% of federal workers report to work in-person on a full-time basis.”
That refers to a nonscientific, opt-in survey by the Federal News Network of federal employees in April 2024 that found that among the 6,338 respondents to the survey, “about 30% said they work entirely remotely, 6% work entirely in-person and 64% were working on a hybrid schedule — a mix of in-person work and telework.”
Sen. Joni Ernst, chair of the Senate caucus of the Department of Government Efficiency, used the survey when accusing federal workers of abusing telework. Senate Majority Leader John Thune also cited the statistic on Fox News on Feb. 14, saying, “There is an enormous amount of room for reduction in force and the fact borne out by a study that was done not all that long ago, it was actually reported on by the New York Times that only 6% of the federal workforce is back in the office full time. I mean, think about that.”
But the survey, it turns out, was not reflective of the actual situation. An editor’s note was added to the Federal News Network story on Dec. 6 “to clarify that the survey was a non-scientific survey of respondents who self-reported that they are current federal employees, and who were self-selected.”
The story was also updated to include data from the OMB that contradicts the findings of the survey.
The August OMB report noted that 1.2 million of the 2.3 million civilian federal employees — 54% — “worked fully on-site, as their jobs require them to be physically present during all working hours.” About 10% of federal workers (228,000) worked fully from home.
According to OMB, “Among all federal employees, excluding remote workers that do not have a work-site to report to, 79.4% of regular, working hours were spent in-person.”
“Among the subset of federal workers that are telework-eligible, excluding remote workers, 61.2% of regular, working hours were spent in-person,” the report states. Going into the office three out of five days of the workweek would be 60%.
A Congressional Budget Office report published in April 2024 found that “[f]ederal employees and their private-sector counterparts teleworked at roughly similar rates in 2022.”
In November, the Government Accountability Office released a report on the effect of teleworking at four federal agencies and agency officials told them that limiting work-from-home opportunities hurt recruitment and retention of employees. An OPM report issued in December 2023 also concluded that when “[i]mplemented intentionally and balanced with meaningful in-person work” telework can lead to “increased productivity” and “lower employee attrition.”
But encouraging some of those resistant to full-time in-person work to quit is part of the Trump administration’s goal.
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” Elon Musk, head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in November, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, who is no longer with DOGE.
Whether to downsize the federal workforce is a matter of opinion, and we take no position on that. But it is grossly exaggerated to say that only 4% of federal workers occupy federal office spaces.
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