EPA orders most workers back within weeks, breaking union covenants

The Environmental Protection Agency told employees Wednesday that the vast majority of them would be expected to return to traditional work sites over the next three months, with most expected in-office five days a week before the end of February.

In an email obtained by Government Executive, teleworking EPA employees who are represented by the National Treasury Employees Union, National Association of Government Employees or the National Association of Independent Labor, as well as workers at the Environmental Science Center must return to full-time in-person work by February 24. Teleworkers represented by the American Federation of Government Employees must return by March 24.

Remote workers represented by AFGE must return to a traditional office by April 7. All other remote workers will come back in two phases: First, those who live within 50 miles of an EPA office must return by March 10. Non-bargaining unit employees outside of that radius must return by April 7, while ESC workers and those represented by NTEU, NAGE and NAIL must return by May 5.

The return-to-office mandate does not apply to employees who have reasonable accommodations due to a disability, employees on Domestic Employees Teleworking Overseas arrangements or military spouses. The EPA did not respond to a request for comment.

“Consistent with the presidential memorandum issued on Jan. 20, 2025, EPA has determined that its employees’ duties require them to be face-to-face with their supervisors, colleagues, clients and the public to the maximum extent possible,” the notice stated.

For the unions at the agency, the move marks a new, though not unexpected, escalation in the early skirmishes between the Trump administration and organized labor. In a memo earlier this month, OPM instructed agencies to ignore collective bargaining agreement provisions governing telework, citing a blanket assertion that the policies infringe on “management rights.”

Legally speaking, contracts carry the “force of law,” meaning they can only be immediately overridden due to the enactment of legislation, not due to agency policy or guidance documents.

Nicole Cantello, president of AFGE Local 704, which represents EPA workers in the Chicago area, and legislative and political director of AFGE Council 238, said her union is already examining all legal options, including individual or joint grievances, to “vigorously defend the contract.”

“[Following OPM’s guidance] is exactly what they’re doing—they’re just ignoring the contract provisions,” Cantello said. “And, you know, they took the step to eliminate members of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Federal Labor Relations Authority because they knew that means our chance of challenging this is limited.”

Cantello said the agency hasn’t approached the union about telework, and has not told employees how it plans to assign duty stations to employees with remote work agreements who live more than 50 miles from an EPA office, or if it even has physical space for everyone.

And she said ending telework—which AFGE had locked at four days per week until 2027 last June—will cause hardship both for the individual employees’ whose lives are upended by the decision and the agency itself, which has seen increased productivity in recent years due to the flexibility.

“I have three lawyers just in my region that just contacted us in the last two weeks and said that if the return-to-office order was given, they would have to leave the agency, and I expect there are many others like this,” she said. “[The] EPA has seen extraordinary productivity gains since we started working full time during the pandemic. Management has been yelling from the rooftops how productive EPA has been.”