Federal Workers in Southern California Returning to Murky Office Environment

The freshly inaugurated Trump administration is requiring thousands of federal workers across Southern California to stop working from home and return to their offices, but just how much space they’ll have to work with by the end of the year is a lingering question.

President Donald Trump last week issued a directive ending remote-work agreements within the executive branch, barring some exemptions. Two days later, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a memo outlining guidance for departments and agencies to fulfill the order, recommending that they comply within 30 days. Some 1.1 million federal workers were eligible for telework, while 228,000 worked fully remote, according to an Office of Management and Budget report in August.

Over 147,000 federal workers are based in California, according to OPM data from March 2024, though it’s unclear how many in the state are eligible for telework or remote work. The federal government leases 168 buildings totaling nearly 2.8 million square feet across the Los Angeles, Long Beach and Santa Ana regions, accounting for about $134 million in annual rent cost, according to a recent report by Trepp. 

Yet despite Trump’s moves to bring federal employees back to the office, the president and his allies have not been shy about their intentions to shrink the federal government’s footprint  in the name of efficiency and lowering costs. Those measures include using return-to-office mandates as a means of coercing workers to quit, or by shedding much more of the federal real estate portfolio. 

The General Services Administration has for years cut back on the government’s owned and leased assets, which today account for about 360 million square feet across the country and its territories. But recent reports indicate that the Trump administration is interested in pursuing that downsizing effort far more aggressively — potentially selling as much as two-thirds of the government’s owned space.

With a depressed office market and a lingering availability and vacancy problem, rented space in Southern California could be ripe for cuts. 

About 35 percent of the federally leased space in Southern California is set to expire by the end of this year alone, which could save nearly $42 million in annual rent cost.

And that’s just in California. More than 500 federal leases accounting for over 8 million square feet are eligible for termination by year’s end, the majority in the Washington, D.C., region. Meanwhile, over 35 percent of all federal leases — about 53 million square feet in 2,532 buildings, costing $1.87 billion in annual rent — are eligible for termination by the end of Trump’s term, according to Trepp. 

Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.