After returning to the White House on January 20, President Donald Trump issued numerous executive orders — one of them telling federal employees who had been working remotely since the COVID-19 pandemic to return to physical offices.
But according to Reuters reporters Tim Reid, Ted Hesson, Sarah N. Lynch and Leah Douglas, those workers are encountering a range of problems.
For example, the Reuters journalists report that at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) office in Washington, "employees returned to an infestation of cockroaches" and are "working in chairs with no desks."
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"In a private chat," the reporters note in an article published on March 16, "staffers at U.S. 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. And 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."
Ten federal workers interviewed by Reuters said that federal employees are coping with offices that were unprepared for their returns.
Some of the interviewees alleged that the conditions in government offices are part of Trump's campaign to greatly downsize the United States' federal workforce.
Trump, with the help of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is pushing mass layoffs of federal government workers.
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"The federal employees work inside eight different government agencies across the U.S. who have returned to their office buildings, sometimes after years of working remotely," Reid, Hesson, Lynch and Douglas report. "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."
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