An estimated 1.1 million federal workers have been eligible to work from home, and forcing them back to the office could come at a high carbon cost.
As part of a flurry of executive orders signed on the first day of his presidency, Trump ordered that all government departments require employees to return to work in person.
Two days later, guidelines were released that gave federal agencies just hours to update policies on remote work. From then on, remote workers were required to be back in the office full-time within 30 days.
How many people are affected by Trump’s remote work ban?
The US government is the largest employer in the country. According to the US Office of Personnel Management, 2.3 million Americans are employed by the state.
Around 1.1 million of these employees have, until now, been eligible for remote work, and Reuters reports that 228,000 work fully remotely. Of those who ‘telework’ – partly in the office and partly at home – around 61 per cent of their working hours are spent in the office.
Demanding these 1.1 million people to return to the workplace could present punishing changes.
“Federal workers who have been working remotely for an extended period are likely to have made significant life decisions based on their flexible working arrangements,” says Dr Julia Richardson, professor of human resource management at Curtin University. “It may have influenced where they bought a house, what school their children attend, and what their spouse or partner does for work”.
Dr Richardson concluded that Trump’s order will likely have a “dramatic ripple effect” on workers and their families.
Does working from home cut your carbon footprint?
There’s another side to the remobilisation of such a huge workforce. Carbon emissions and climate change aren’t high on the new president’s agenda, but forcing such a large number of workers back into a daily commute could have far-reaching implications for the environment.
“Returning federal employees to full-time office work would significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions,” Fengqi You, professor of energy systems engineering at Cornell University tells Euronews Green.
“Our past research shows that remote work can cut carbon footprints by up to 54 per cent, while hybrid models offer reductions of 11–29 per cent. Shifting entirely back to in-office work would undo these environmental benefits and exacerbate emissions from personal vehicle use, particularly in areas lacking robust public transportation.”
Why is sending workers back to the office detrimental to the environment?
If you ask any remote worker about the benefits of working from home, they’ll likely tell you about their better work-life balance, increased productivity, and time saved by not commuting. What you hear less about is the significant carbon emissions they cut from their lifestyles by not going into the workplace.
The bulk of these savings come from not commuting to the workplace daily. A typical passenger in a car in the US emits around 350 grams of CO2 per mile driven. However, when that mile is in stop-start rush hour traffic, emissions can rise by around a third.
Energy savings can also be achieved in the workplace, but only if the building is managed correctly. Keeping a large building fully open with fewer people would make any savings negligible, as most building emissions are not sensitive to occupancy.
A better solution is to right-size the building and employ seat-sharing, or hotdesking, to accommodate hybrid workers. Cornell’s modelling found greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced by 28 per cent under this strategy.
However, the researchers also point out that the environmental impact differs depending on the individual worker and the business. A worker living in a big city with easy access to mass transit options would have a far lower commuting carbon footprint than one who drove a petrol car for an hour to reach their office.
Then there are the offsets of more energy being consumed in the home while the employee is working remotely. Oddly, the research found people who worked from home tended to take more frequent personal trips in their cars and, as a family, had more cars.
“Remote work is not zero carbon, and the benefits of hybrid work are not perfectly linear,” says Fengqi You. “Everybody knows without commuting you save on transportation energy, but there’s always lifestyle effects and many other factors”.
How will a return to work affect federal carbon reduction targets?
Bringing people back to the workplace will come at a carbon cost. As well as commuting emissions, having more people in the building will mean more power consumption, more cooling in the summer, and more water use.
Under the previous administration, federal buildings had a target for net zero emissions by 2045, including a 50 per cent reduction by 2023. Details of that policy, held by the Office of the Federal Chief Sustainability Officer, are now available via archive only.
The current policy on federal building energy efficiency standards, updated on 27 January, maintains some elements of good practice standards. But these policy updates now include more open-ended wording such as ‘to the extent practicable’ and ‘if life-cycle cost-effective’.
So although federal buildings are still encouraged to improve energy efficiency and employ renewable technologies, there’s always a get-out-of-jail-free card to play.
On transport, the previous administration was working towards the Paris Agreement goals, with a matching target of net-zero emissions by 2050 and an interim target of 50-52 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Aggressive targets are necessary here: transportation accounts for one-third of US greenhouse gas emissions.
President Trump hasn’t specifically mentioned transportation, although he did revoke an order requiring half of all new vehicles sold to be electric. Crucially, he withdrew from the Paris Agreement, so the net zero target is somewhat arbitrary now.
More important to the current administration is “improved accountability of government bureaucrats”. The White House statement further says, “the American people deserve the highest-quality service from people who love our country,” before stating that only 6 per cent of federal employees work in person.
In a sternly worded memo sent out on 22 January, Charles Ezell, acting director at the Office of Personnel Management, described remote working as a ‘roadblock’ and a ‘national embarrassment’.
With a directive that will cause several hundred thousand cars to join the hoards struggling into cities every morning, there could be a few more roadblocks on the way. That certainly will be a national embarrassment.
