‘Cockroaches, no chairs or desks, messy NASA: Employees describe offices as Trump’s work-from-office order resumes

US federal government employees who were forced to return to working from office from January 20 have described chaotic workplace conditions in government buildings, including cockroach-infested offices, as they returned after years of working from home.

US President Donald Trump had ordered government employees to return to work full-time from their offices as part of efforts to reshape and reorient the 2.3 million strong federal workforce. The administration seeks to cut “wasteful expenditure” and improve “efficiency” with the help of billionaire Elon Musk, the head of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

‘Messy NASA’

At NASA headquarters in Washington, just a mile from the U.S. Capitol, employees returned to an infestation of cockroaches and some are working in chairs with no desks, according to two people familiar with conditions there, a Reuters report said.

“It’s complete chaos at NASA headquarters,” said Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers, a union that represents 8,000 federal NASA workers. “If you don’t have a desk or a computer you cannot do your job. People are much more unproductive.”

Biggs and a staff member at NASA headquarters said when employees returned to the building last month there were cockroaches on floors and bugs that came out of faucets.

Biggs and another NASA staff member said the noise and crush inside NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland has led some people to take meetings by phone inside their cars, using their personal hotspot to get internet access.

Some NASA workers ordered back to Goddard live up to 50 miles away, and are so worried about the commute time and traffic they are turning up before dawn and sleeping in their vehicles before it’s time to start work, Biggs and the staff member said.

In a private chat, staffers at US 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.

Fights for chairs, desks

While most of the workers are returning to workplaces they left at the start of the 2020 pandemic, many others are teleworkers who had been working full-time from home or had a hybrid schedule that meant they worked only part of the time in an office.

Federal employees described fights for desks and chairs, internet outages, a lack of parking spaces, with some sitting on floors and others told to use their personal smartphone hotspots to gain computer access to government data.

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.

No internet, parking space

Reuters also viewed three back-to-work memos sent to staff, informing some of them that they won’t have a workspace or internet access when they return. The US Food and Drug Administration told staff it cannot guarantee desks or parking spots for the roughly 18,000 employees expected to report to offices.

To date more than 100,000 workers have left the federal government after being fired or taking a buyout, according to Trump administration figures and a Reuters tally of those fired. More large-scale cuts are under way.

Some labor unions say the chaotic execution of the return-to-work order is a deliberate ploy to force more federal workers to leave government by making workplaces stressful.