Tag: Freeze

President Donald Trump issued a slew of executive actions on his first day in office, both reviving familiar efforts from his first term and reversing a number of policies from the Biden administration.

In total, Trump signed more than two dozen executive orders Monday evening, including one that orders a federal hiring freeze at agencies.

“The President will usher a golden age for America by reforming and improving the government bureaucracy to work for the American people,” White House officials wrote in a summary of presidential actions Monday. “He will freeze bureaucrat hiring except in essential areas to end the onslaught of useless and overpaid [diversity, equity and inclusion] activists buried into the federal workforce.”

As of noon on Inauguration Day, the order directs agencies not to fill any vacant federal positions or create any new roles. The executive order clarifies, though, that military personnel, as well as employees in immigration enforcement, national security or public safety positions are exempt from the hiring freeze. The Office of Personnel Management also has the authority to grant further hiring exemptions as necessary. The EO prohibits agencies from hiring more contractors in response to the order.

Trump also directed OPM and the Office of Management and Budget to work with the Department of Government Efficiency, a nongovernmental advisory panel, to submit a plan for reducing the size of the federal workforce “through efficiency improvements and attrition.” Once the agencies and DOGE submit their proposal, the hiring freeze will lift — except for at the IRS, which the order said will remain under a hiring freeze until it’s determined that “it is in the national interest to lift the freeze.”

The hiring freeze has implications for federal employees working across the country, as more than 80% of the federal workforce operates outside the Washington, D.C., area. Currently, the federal government employs about 2.2 million career civil servants. Between 2019 and 2023, the federal workforce grew by over 140,000 employees, according to data analysis from the Partnership for Public Service.

Federal unions, organizations and some lawmakers have argued that a federal hiring freeze would prevent agencies from delivering mission critical services to the public. They have said budget limitations already negatively impact the federal workforce and agencies’ ability to carry out their work.

Max Stier, the Partnership’s president and CEO, told reporters last week that a hiring freeze would be “poor management of our government.”

“Broad hiring freezes run contrary to clear needs of the federal workforce to deliver the kinds of services that the public really wants,” Stier said. “If the Trump administration is interested in trying to hold the line on federal hiring, the way to do this is to actually do the hard work of examining where do we need fewer people, and where do we need more.”

For instance, Stier said the Customs and Border Protection would likely need more Border Patrol agents to support the Trump administration’s goals of hardening border security. He added that the Secret Service also faces a “massive challenge” of staffing up to meet its mission.

The new hiring freeze is nearly identical to an executive action Trump took on his first day in office in 2017. At the time, the Trump administration issued a memo to bar agencies from filling vacant positions and creating new positions, except in certain cases to meet national or public security needs. The 2017 hiring freeze lasted until mid-April, and the Trump administration then tasked agencies with restructuring their workforces.

In a 2017 survey by the National Treasury Employees Union, a majority of federal employees said the hiring freeze led to increasing workloads and worsening morale. Agencies including the State Department also said the hiring freeze had lasting, negative impacts even years later.

Federal employees face return-to-office directive

Beyond the hiring freeze, Trump also signed an executive order Monday telling agencies to return their federal employees to work at the office “as soon as practicable.” The President directed agencies to end remote work arrangements and require employees to work in person full time. The order does give agencies some flexibilities, allowing department and agency heads to “make exemptions they deem necessary.”

The executive action was expected, particularly after Trump made comments during a December press conference saying that all federal employees should return to the office or else be dismissed from their jobs. Trump has also criticized and threatened legal action against the contract signed by the American Federation of Government Employees and the Social Security Administration in November to extend the agency’s current telework policy through 2029.

A White House summary Monday afternoon listed the federal return-to-office mandate as part of what it called its “drain the swamp” agenda.

“President Trump is planning for improved accountability of government bureaucrats,” White House officials wrote Monday. “The American people deserve the highest quality service from people who love our country.”

Returning employees to the office has also been an early priority of DOGE, led by billionaire Elon Musk. In a Nov. 20 Wall Street Journal op-ed, DOGE leaders called for a fully in-person federal workforce and said they would “welcome” voluntary terminations of feds that came as a result of a return-to-office mandate.

Trump officials falsely stated that only 6% of federal employees are working in person. Agency data has shown that more than half of the federal workforce reports to work onsite every day due to the nature of their jobs, such as federal firefighters, park rangers, law enforcement officers, Transportation Security Administration supervisors and many others.

Federal employees who are eligible for telework currently spend about 60% of their work hours in person. The increase of onsite work for federal employees came after the Biden administration told agencies in April 2023 to begin scaling back on telework after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. By the spring of 2024, many — but not all — agencies were reporting at least a 50% onsite presence of telework-eligible employees.

Trump’s executive order returning federal employees to the office was quickly met with strong pushback from federal unions and lawmakers. Unions have also pointed to the legal standing of collective bargaining agreements with agencies, which typically include provisions on agency telework policies.

“To justify this backward action, lawmakers and members of President Trump’s transition team have spent months exaggerating the number of federal employees who telework and accusing those who do of failing to perform the duties of their jobs. The truth is that less than half of all federal jobs are eligible for telework, and the workers who are eligible to telework still spend most of their work hours at their regular duty stations,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement Monday. “Rather than undoing decades of progress in workplace policies that have benefited both employees and their employers, I encourage the Trump administration to rethink its approach and focus on what it can do to make government programs work better for the American people.”

A return-to-office directive would also likely run into challenges with physical office space. Some agencies have scaled back their federal office holdings over the last few years, leaving limited amount of space available for a fully in-person workforce. The Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget also said it expected agencies to shed millions of square feet of building space in the coming years, as many federal employees now operate under a hybrid work schedule.

Republican lawmakers have repeatedly criticized telework options for federal employees, arguing that it worsens agency services to the public, and contributes to delays and backlogs at agencies. GOP leaders on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have been particularly vocal about efforts to push federal employees back to fully in-person work.

Some critics of federal telework have also said telework prevents agencies from accurately tracking employees’ productivity levels and leaves federal office buildings largely vacant.

The Biden administration’s OPM, however, reported that agencies have improved their ability to track and measure telework’s impact on productivity. In a December 2024 report to Congress, then-OPM Acting Director Rob Shriver also said telework has led to “significant increases” in human capital cost savings due to reduced attrition at agencies. Federal telework may also lead to reduced real estate costs for agencies, OPM said, as agencies continue to downsize their federal footprint.

“The results are clear,” Shriver said. “In this transition period agencies report notable improvements in recruitment and retention, enhanced employee performance and organizational productivity and considerable cost savings when utilizing telework as an element of their hybrid work environments.”

Copyright
© 2025 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.