No Toilet Paper and No Privacy: Returning to the Office, Federal Workers Walk Into Chaos

For some federal employees, returning to the office has meant an expansion of their duties to include cleaning toilets and taking out the trash. For others, it has been commuting to a federal building only to continue doing their work through videoconferencing.

Some showed up at the office just to be sent home. Others showed up early and had no where to sit. Some employees with the Federal Aviation Administration returned to an office where lead had been detected in the water. And spending freezes have meant a shortage of toilet paper in some buildings.

Federal workers have been returning to offices in stages since President Trump issued an order to do so right after being sworn in. He has described the requirement as a way to ensure that workers are actually doing their jobs while believing that it could have the added benefit of leading more government employees to quit.

“We think a very substantial number of people will not show up to work, and therefore our government will get smaller and more efficient,” Mr. Trump said.

For those who have gone back, the process has been marred by a lack of planning and coordination by the administration, leading to confusion, plummeting morale and more inefficiency, according to interviews with dozens of federal workers, most of whom would speak only on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.

They have described the logistical challenges, cramped conditions and shortages of basic supplies that come with such a blunt policy change for the nearly one million employees who had been working in a hybrid or entirely remote position when Mr. Trump returned to the Oval Office. At the beginning of the year, the civilian federal work force was estimated to be about 2.3 million, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

On March 17, when employees with the Food and Drug Administration returned to offices at the agency’s White Oak campus outside Washington, parking was scarce and a line snaked around the block with people waiting to get through security.

Soon, bathrooms ran out of toilet paper and paper towels. The cafeteria had not stocked enough food and there were not enough office supplies. And that was just a fraction of the problems.

A scientist with the agency, who was hired into a remote position, now has to share office space while she works on sensitive and proprietary projects, creating ethical and practical concerns.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, employees were told to brace for limited parking at two of the agency’s campuses. “Drive to Corporate Square and sit in the overflow space in Building 11. Be prepared to work from your laptop and Wi-Fi,” read a sign posted on the agency’s intranet.

At one campus, it can take 90 minutes just to leave because the parking is so full and choke points are at every turn. It can be hard to even back out of a space, one employee said.

It’s crowded, the employee said, because the C.D.C. campus was never designed for all employees to work in the office. Over the past 10 years, there was a long-term plan to reduce the number of leased properties the agency used, which required an increase in remote work. But the Trump administration has banned that option.

The Internal Revenue Service faced similar problems.

Jeff Eppler, a retired manager at the Internal Revenue Service, said some employees who work directly with Americans on their tax returns did show up at the office on the first day they were set to return, March 10, only to be sent home.

“So instead of working that day, they spent time hanging out in the office and then were eventually sent back home to do the work that they would have been doing the whole day,” he said.

In some cases, I.R.S. managers contacted employees on the weekend before the return date to tell them to continue work remotely. One I.R.S. employee described having to choose between reporting to an office knowing there was not enough space or continuing to work from home in violation of agency rules.

Another I.R.S. employee described working while sitting on the floor during part of the first day back in the office because a cubicle the employee had reserved was no longer available.

A doctor for the Department of Veterans Affairs said her return to the office after working remotely for the past two years had been dominated by sorting out seating charts, setting office hours and finding equipment for herself and her colleagues — tasks that are outside of her job description and led to hours of wasted time.

The Biden administration sought to have employees back working at the office half of each week. But the Trump administration demanded that all civilian employees return to the office full-time, including those who were hired into remote positions.

Some agencies gave workers weeks of notice about when they would need to report to an office. Others received a heads-up a few days before.

One employee of the Forest Service described having been hired into a remote position without a specific physical office. In fact, when she was hired, the government paperwork stated that her “duty location” was her home address.

In some cases, employees at the Forest Service were told to look for any federal building within 50 miles of where they live. It did not have to be a building leased by its parent agency, the Department of Agriculture.

As a result, she and some colleagues are reporting to offices where there is a desk available. They continue to have virtual meetings, as they did while working from home. In some locations, even that is difficult, because the wireless signals are so weak that employees are not receiving messages or able to log onto video conferences.

Because contracts have been cut by the administration’s attempts to impose spending cuts and freezes, federal employees in some locations are having to pitch in on janitorial work. Some people say they are cleaning toilets instead of doing the jobs for which they were hired. This decreases productivity, the Forest Service worker said.

The return to office requirement ignores union contracts that include remote work.

As of May 2024, more than half of all civilian employees were already working in federal offices, according to data from the Office of Management and Budget.

Neither the White House nor the Office of Management and Budget responded to questions about how many workers were in the office full-time. And only five of more than a dozen agencies contacted by The New York Times provided an update.

The Treasury Department said that as of late March, 85 percent of the agency’s employees were back in the office. Many workers have returned to the Small Business Administration, as well, an official there said. An official from the Environmental Protection Agency said that 68 percent of its employees who are based in Washington have returned to the office full-time. Nearly 10,000 employees with Veterans Affairs have gone back to in-person work since Jan. 20, with more set to return in the next few weeks, a spokesman said. And 120,000 civilian employees with the Department of Defense have resumed in-person work since Jan. 20.

The in-person work mandate is just one piece of the massive and disruptive overhaul of the federal work force being driven by the tech billionaire Elon Musk. This has included bulk firings, rehirings, court-mandated reinstatements and spending freezes.

Despite the name of the group Mr. Musk leads, the Department of Government Efficiency, federal employees say there is hardly anything efficient about how the Trump administration is going about the cuts. It has led to a massive change in schedules with a return-to-office mandate while simultaneously encouraging federal workers to retire or firing them only to be forced to rehire them.

The requirements have brought disarray to the workday, many said, as workers worry about being laid off and not being able to support their families.

While federal employees are contending with the logistical challenges around changing their routine, including school drop-off and pickup and trying to get into before-care and aftercare programs mid-school year, they are also aware that they could be among the next group of laid-off federal employees.

At the Department of Energy, for some divisions, the agency’s leadership said employees must return to offices in the Washington area by May 5, even though some work thousands of miles away from there but near other departmental facilities. For some, that means making a decision to pick up and move without even knowing whether they will be part of the next round of layoffs.

Andrew Duehren, Christina Jewett and Apoorva Mandavilli contributed reporting.