The era of remote work in Washington has ended: A Gallup survey released Wednesday reveals that the proportion of federal employees working in-office has increased significantly compared to last year.
“In Washington, the hybrid era is over. After President Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration ended remote work for most federal employees,” Gallup noted. “As a result, the number of federal employees working in a flexible hybrid work model plummeted from 61% in late 2024 to 28% in the latest data from Q2 of this year. Now, 46% of federal government workers are fully on-site, more than double the national average (21%).”
President Trump’s return-to-office order marked an early push by the administration to drive federal employees out of the workforce. Many workers chose to resign rather than report to offices they had never used or that were located far from their homes.
The directive also signaled the administration’s willingness to disregard union contracts that guaranteed hybrid or remote work arrangements. Since then, the White House has moved to strip nearly 500,000 federal employees of their union rights, Axios reported.
Employers appear to be exerting more control over hybrid work too, according to Gallup. The share of employees who say their schedule is “entirely up to me” slipped from 37% in 2024 to 34% in 2025. Today, hybrid schedules are split almost evenly: 34% say they decide for themselves, 35% say their manager or team determines, and 31% say leadership sets the schedule. That last figure has held steady for two years, Gallup noted.
Control plays a key role in how workers perceive fairness. Employees who set their own hybrid schedule are just as likely to see it as fair as those whose teams make the decision—91% in both cases. However, when the employer dictates the schedule, only 73% view the policy as fair, Gallup said.
“The Achilles’ heel of remote work is trust. Just over half of managers (54%) who manage remote workers strongly agree they trust their teams to be productive when they are working remotely. Similarly, 57% of employees say they feel trusted by their manager to be productive when they are working remotely,” said the pollster.
