Part III: FD Stonewater Managing Director Norman Dong, who oversaw the federal government's office portfolio for the General Services Administration between 2014 and 2017, said that labor was a huge component of discussions about real estate needs during that time.

He said that guidance issued by OMB in 2021 delegating the task of return-to-office plans to agency heads and other top officials has driven much of the internal discussions over re-entry since.

“Agencies are competing for talent in terms of recruiting and retaining employees. Telework is something that factors into the mix," Dong said. “I come back to the written guidance. That is like gospel to people."

But despite broad pronouncements that telework is here to stay, commercial office owners have been frustrated by re-entey plans that are piecemeal and lack a clear overall direction from the top, said Darien Leblanc, an executive vice chairman at Cushman & Wakefield.

“If the federal government is going to embrace broad-scale remote work across most federal agencies indefinitely, then announcing that publicly will be helpful, because then the private sector can begin to extrapolate what that could mean,” Leblanc said. “The deafening silence right now in terms of what it consists of means that people can’t plan.”

D.C. leaders say the effects of federal workers’ slow return to downtown buildings are clear: Retail vacancies remain high in the office-heavy downtown and East End, where workers once bought lunch, visited dry cleaners and shopped regularly. The Washington-area Metro system is also missing hundreds of thousands of riders.

But despite that strain, one area where union leaders and policy setters in the federal government agree is that the federal government’s footprint will shrink, a policy that Transwestern Managing Director Lucy Kitchin described at a Bisnow event last year as one of “reduction, reduction, reduction." That’s likely to continue as the federal government competes with the private sector for labor.

More than a quarter of federal workers are set to retire by 2027, forcing the feds to incorporate incentives like teleworking to promote recruitment and retention, according to an analysis by JLL shared with Bisnow. Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office is preparing a Federal Building Utilization Study that will provide some answers on just how many workers are returning to the office when it is published in the coming months, Dong said.

But Shonfield said the cat is already out of the bag — EEOC employees have told her they’ve had an easier time doing much of their work handling workplace disputes remotely. The union is continuing to negotiate a more permanent telework policy, and she said she’s advocating for more flexibility going forward.