President Donald Trump has ordered all federal employees to return to the office five days a week and many private companies are doing the same in 2025. However, a recent PEW survey finds many American workers say they would rather find a new job than give up remote work.
Among employed adults who have a job that can be done from home, 75% are working remotely at least some of the time, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Nearly half of the workers in this group (46%) say that if their employer no longer allowed them to work from home at all, they would be unlikely to stay at their current job.
The survey found a growing number of workers with jobs that can be done from home say they are now required to work from their office, workplace, or job site a certain number of days per week or month. Among those who are not currently working from home all the time, 75% say their employer has put in-person work requirements in place, up from 63% in early 2023.
Amazon, AT&T, Walmart, JPMorgan, Citigroup, are among the private companies requiring a full return to the office five days a week in 2025, according to various news reports.
In the case of federal workers, Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order potentially affects 1.1 million government employees (out of a total 2.8 million workers) who had been eligible for remote work arrangements. Of those 1.1 million, 228,000 workers have been fully remote.
Whether return-to-office policies spur a wave of resignations or retirements from resistant workers in 2025 remains to be seen. But in the case of federal workers at least, the Trump administration has signaled this would be a desired outcome.
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” wrote Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal after Trump’s election.
At the time the op-ed was published, Musk and Ramaswamy had been tapped by Trump to co-lead his administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) tasked with reducing government spending. On Jan. 20, Ramaswamy stepped down from DOGE to run for public office in Ohio, leaving Musk in charge of the agency.
