WASHINGTON. – At NASA headquarters in Washington, just a mile from the US Capitol, employees returned to an infestation of cockroaches and some are working in chairs with no desks, according to two people familiar with conditions there.
In a private chat, staffers at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services likened the hunt for desks in some regional offices to “The Hunger Games,” the popular series of novels and films where young people must fight to the death in a government-sanctioned contest.
At an Internal Revenue Service office in Memphis, Tennessee, tax assessors sharing a training room are unable to discuss sensitive tax matters with clients over the phone out of fear of breaching privacy laws, according to one IRS manager who spoke to Reuters.
Hundreds of thousands of US federal government employees, many of whom have been working from home since the COVID-19 pandemic, were ordered back to their offices full-time by President Donald Trump on January 20.
Many have arrived at workplaces unprepared for their return, according to 10 federal workers who spoke to Reuters.
The federal employees work inside eight different government agencies across the US who have returned to their office buildings, sometimes after years of working remotely. All spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.
Some critics of the move – including governance experts, federal union representatives and civil servants – have said the lack of preparation is no accident.
They see it as a deliberate effort to make offices so unpleasant to work in that it will force more government employees to resign. Trump wants to slash and reshape the 2.3-million-strong federal civilian workforce.
Governance experts and labor unions say Trump’s return to office order is also emblematic of a wider problem with how the Republican president and his top adviser, tech billionaire Elon Musk, are approaching the government overhaul.
“It’s the move fast and break things approach, without really thinking through the implications of a range of different choices you are making,” said Pam Herd, a professor of social policy at the University of Michigan. “So they tell everyone to return to work without considering the fact that they don’t have the space to accommodate everyone.”
Trump and Musk have insisted their goal is to make the US government bureaucracy less costly for taxpayers and more efficient and to eliminate waste and fraud.
A spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources department, said the goal of Trump’s return-to-office order is for federal employees to work efficiently to best serve the American people.
“We are prioritizing in-person work to strengthen collaboration, accountability, and service delivery across the federal workforce,” an OPM spokesperson said.
A White House official said in response to Reuters’ questions that facilities staff at the General Services Administration, which manages federal real estate, “work tirelessly to address reported issues to a satisfactory outcome.”
A spokesperson for Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency did not respond to a request for comment.
Fights for desks, chairs
While most of the workers are returning to workplaces they left at the start of the 2020 pandemic, many others are teleworkers who had been working full-time from home or had a hybrid schedule that meant they worked only part of the time in an office.
Federal employees described fights for desks and chairs, internet outages, and a lack of parking spaces, with some sitting on floors and others told to use their personal smartphone hotspots to gain computer access to government data.
Reuters also viewed three back-to-work memos sent to staff, informing some of them that they wouldn’t have a workspace or internet access when they return. The US Food and Drug Administration told staff this week it cannot guarantee desks or parking spots for the roughly 18,000 employees expected to report to offices on Monday.
A manager at the IRS’ Washington headquarters told colleagues on a conference call on Tuesday she was sitting on a floor with her computer on her lap because she didn’t have a desk, according to an IRS manager who was on the call.
An IRS human resources official in California was told to work in a supply closet, according to one person familiar with the arrangement.
The IRS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
‘It’s complete Chaos’
To date, more than 100,000 workers have left the federal government after being fired or taking a buyout, according to Trump administration figures and a Reuters tally of those fired. More large-scale cuts are under way.
Some labor unions say the chaotic execution of the return-to-work order is a deliberate ploy to force more federal workers to leave the government by making workplaces stressful.
“Bringing people back to work was nothing but a ploy to cause more confusion and get people to quit,” said Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees, which represents 110,000 government workers.
Musk and DOGE have a mandate to make the federal bureaucracy more efficient, but all the workers who spoke to Reuters said the return-to-office order is currently having the opposite effect.
“It’s complete chaos at NASA headquarters,” said Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers, a union that represents 8,000 federal NASA workers. “If you don’t have a desk or a computer, you cannot do your job. People are much more unproductive.”
Biggs and a staff member at NASA headquarters said when employees returned to the building last month, there were cockroaches on floors and bugs that came out of faucets.
