Demonstrators protest against Fox News and U.S. President Donald Trump outside News Corporation headquarters in midtown Manhattan in New York City, U.S., March 4, 2025. REUTERS/Mike Segar
President Donald Trump has ordered federal workers back into the office — after years of working from home following the pandemic — but some of those office spaces are being vacated, according to a new report.
A lease had been canceled for office space in a southern U.S. state that housed Agriculture Department employees, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. The termination takes effect in the spring.
“We don’t really know what this means,” a worker told the Post. They spoke anonymously out of fear of reprisal. “We can’t telework, but we aren’t going to have an office in a couple of months?”
The report said Trump's mandate "led to chaos."
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"Workers have reported being compelled to kill time in hallways while they wait for their turn at desks in overcapacity offices, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency directed managers to flip a coin to resolve some conflicts over scarce workspaces," said the Post.
Trump signed an executive order creating a task force to make trillions in government spending and staff cuts. Tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency initiative operates under that order rather than via congressional legislation.
On Monday, CoStar reported that DOGE "canceled about one in 10 active federal commercial real estate leases."
The DOGE website said 748 leases were canceled as of Monday, the Post cited.
CoStar created an interactive map showing the cancellations in states around the country. The overwhelming majority of the pins on the map are located in states that supported Trump in 2024.
OU Daily, the University of Oklahoma school newspaper, reported that one of the National Weather Service's two offices was closed — the Radar Operations Center in Norman was shuttered after the lease to the radar lab was canceled.
The Radar Operations Center is the "centralized hub for technicians and researchers to work on improving and repairing weather radar."
Leadership of an Interior Department office in the Midwest expressed confusion about one of their offices being shuttered.
“They didn’t know it was going to happen. Everyone’s under the assumption it came via GSA and via whoever’s pulling GSA’s strings," an employee told the Post.
Their office lease was terminated, despite the government using the building as part of its “Space Match” program. The effort assigns office space somewhere else in government to any employees who've had their offices leased out from under them.
The Oklahoma and Texas U.S. Geological Survey has been looking for more affordable office space for the past several years. One employee told the Post that they haven't been able to find anything "suitable" enough to house their laboratory and expensive equipment. They were shut down last week.