White House Tasks Cabinet Heads With Boosting Return to Office

The White House is demanding the heads of federal departments and agencies begin personally tracking efforts to get government workers to return to the office, warning that many managers are falling short of President Joe Biden’s goals for increasing in-person work.

“Some of your agencies are not where they need to be and have work ahead to meet your goals,” White House chief of staff Jeff Zients said in a memo obtained by Bloomberg.

The push comes as Washington workers have been slow to return to the office, which local officials have blamed for shops and restaurants in the nation’s capital struggling to regain the level of business they enjoyed before the pandemic.

Over the first quarter of 2023, no federal agency’s headquarters had an average utilization rate above 50%, according to data released by Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican. At three agencies – the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Small Business Administration, and the Social Security Administration — office utilization early last year was below 10%.

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That prompted the White House in August to start pressuring federal managers to get their workers back to the office. Some departments – including large employers like the State Department, Pentagon, and Department of Veterans Affairs – reported more than 50% of staff was working in person by last fall.

Still, other arms of the government appear well short of the administration’s return-to-office goals. Last month, the NHL’s Washington Capitals and NBA’s Washington Wizards announced plans to move from their Washington arena to a new development in northern Virginia, in a another blow to the city’s downtown core.

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Zients said in his memo, first reported by Axios, that he now expected Biden’s Cabinet to personally be “taking appropriate action to meet your agency goals.”

Each federal agency will be expected to produce a document outlining their return-to-office progress, concrete steps they are implementing to encourage workers to return and new implementation steps they plan to take.

“These changes will allow us to come back together — and come back stronger — to best serve the American people,” Zients said. “I ask that you double down on your leadership to increase in-person work, especially at a time where the service of you and your team has never been more important.”

To contact the reporter on this story:
Justin Sink in Washington at jsink1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Mario Parker at mparker22@bloomberg.net

Meghashyam Mali, Jordan Fabian

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