Before thousands of civilian employees and service members were set to return to in-person work on Monday following President Donald Trump’s order to send all federal workers back to the office full time, the Air Force made the decision to exempt some civilians, Airmen and Guardians due to limited workspace. 

Acting Air Force Secretary Gary Ashworth said in a memo from Feb. 6 that the Air Force doesn’t have enough space to accommodate 100% of its workforce in the Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia area and across the Air Force and Space Force installations, both inside and outside of the United States.

“I am exempting such portion of the workforce that cannot currently be accommodate as a result of the shortfall from the Feb. 7 requirement to return to in-person work,” Ashworth said in the memo. “I am also approving the use of alternative work schedules as an alternative means to fill 100% of existing space. These measures are deemed necessary due to a shortfall in suitable office space and will be in effect until additional capacity is achieved.”

The Feb. 6 memo follows the service’s initiative return to in-person work directive from Feb. 1 mandating commands to cancel all telework and remote work agreements and direct personnel working within 50 miles of their workplace to return to office on Feb.7. The directive is in line with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s return to in-person guidance and the Office of Personnel Management memo. 

It is unclear how many employees the Air Force is currently unable to accommodate.

Rose Riley, deputy chief of media operations at the Pentagon, said “the number of remote work and telework employees is evolving as we work to comply with all executive orders.”

Commands were directed not to take any drastic measures, such as converting conference rooms, gymnasiums, or hallways into workstations or displacing their contracting workforce, to create additional workspace.

“There are many variables we must consider before we know what space is available. Our installation leaders continue working to find adequate facility space to accommodate those returning to in-person work,” Riley told Federal News Network.

The memo also directs the Air Force Infrastructure Council to review “significant facility requirements, such as large facilities renovations and modernization efforts, or lease agreements, to accommodate more people. 

Ashworth also updated telework agreements to comply with the president’s return-to-office mandate. In a memo signed on Feb. 10, Ashworth directed major commands and field commands to develop mechanisms to track the number of employees teleworking and working remotely for each exception category listed in the directive. Commands were instructed not to keep records of individual employees’ names when collecting data related to exemptions and only gather and maintain aggregated data.

The president’s return-to-work crackdown has prompted agencies across the federal government to scramble for office space. 

The Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, has reduced its office space by more than 290,000 square feet over the last few years in the National Capital Region.

And the Defense Department told the Office of Management and Budget that the Washington Headquarters Services has terminated 561,000 square feet of leases and returned 275,000 square feet of space to the General Services Administration to be used by other federal tenants in the last five years. WHS plans to reduce its lease space portfolio by 512,000 square feet in the next several years.

“There are agencies that do not have the space for all the federal people. There are agencies that don’t have enough chairs, because when everybody started to telework, they got rid of their chairs. There are agencies now where because they haven’t had to house everybody, you reserve your space two or three days before you go in for your day in the office. And so it’s not clear to any of us out here in the practicing bar that there are enough chairs in offices in the federal government right now for everybody to go back and sit down and be productive. So people will be sitting on radiators, sitting on trash cans, working on tops of filing cabinets, wherever they can happen to squeeze in, because that was the speed of this whole issue. Nobody said to GSA ahead of time, ‘Hey, we’re going to bring them all back. Do we still have room for them? That’s a significant issue,” Dan Meyer, a partner at Tully Rinckey PLLC, told Federal News Network. 

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