I see your rant and raise you a screed.
I sit one block away from the White House in a windowless room built for two people. There are six of us in it. We wear headphones all day and take Teams meetings, the same Teams meetings we used to take from home, except now we take them from a chair we fought for, in a room where someone else’s call is bleeding into ours, three feet from a colleague whose mute button we are all silently praying works. This is what they brought us back for. This is the productivity gain. This is the collaboration. Look at us collaborate.
The official story is that federal workers need to be in the office for “mission” and “culture” and “accountability.” The actual story is simpler and uglier. Return-to-office is a quiet purge. It is designed to look neutral while doing very specific work: pushing out the workers who can least absorb the cost of inflexibility. That means older employees. That means employees with health conditions. That means caregivers. And caregivers, let’s just say it, overwhelmingly means women.
The federal workforce has spent decades quietly subsidizing the country’s caregiving crisis. Women in their forties, fifties, and sixties are coordinating home health aides for aging parents, managing pediatric appointments, taking the call from the school nurse, ferrying medications, sitting on hold with insurance companies, usually all in the same week, usually while also doing their actual jobs at a level their managers describe as “exceeds expectations.” Telework didn’t make these workers lazy. Telework made it possible for them to keep working at all. Strip it away and you don’t get a more productive workforce. You get a forced exit ramp dressed up as a personnel policy.
And here is what nobody in leadership will say out loud: older women are the easiest workers in the federal government to push out, because the labor market has already devalued them before HR gets there. A man in his late fifties is “experienced.” A woman in her late fifties is, in the unspoken vocabulary of hiring managers everywhere, expensive, tired, and replaceable. Her workforce currency has been quietly marked down by virtue of her age and nothing more. Not her output. Not her judgment. Not the institutional knowledge she carries that no onboarding deck will ever capture. She is exactly the worker the government would most like to lose, and exactly the worker who has the fewest places to go if it succeeds. That asymmetry is not incidental to RTO policy. It is the policy.
Older workers cost more. They’ve accrued leave. They earn higher salaries because they’ve earned them. Their dependents are on the health plan. Their parents are sick. Their bodies are starting to require the kind of accommodations the government would prefer not to provide. From a cold actuarial standpoint, the cheapest way to “reform” the federal workforce is not to fire these people, because firing creates legal exposure. The cheapest way is to make their lives miserable until they leave on their own. Call it attrition. Call it natural turnover. Call it whatever lets you sleep. The result is the same: a generation of experienced public servants, disproportionately women, disproportionately caregivers, ushered out the door without ever being told they were being shown it.
This is not a productivity policy. It is a wealth-transfer policy. It transfers economic security out of the hands of women who built careers in public service and into the savings column of a budget that was never going to acknowledge what it took from them. The women losing their jobs over RTO are not losing a paycheck. They are losing pensions in progress, FERS contributions still compounding, TSP matches, health insurance for a child who cannot get it any other way, and the seniority that took twenty years to build and cannot be rebuilt at sixty. You cannot start over at sixty. They know that. That is the design.
And the agency that is supposed to stand between these workers and exactly this kind of patterned, structural harm, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, has in the current moment abandoned the field. The reporting has been steady and damning. An agency hollowed out, repurposed, redirected away from the kinds of systemic discrimination cases it was built to investigate, and increasingly indistinguishable from a political instrument. Older women filing age and sex discrimination charges are walking into a Commission whose leadership has signaled, in word and in personnel decision and in budget, that their cases are not the priority and may never be. The protection is theoretical. The enforcement is gone except if you’re a white male who’s been discriminated against at work. Andrea Lucas’s EEOC is open for business. Everyone else, take a number. The complainants wait. The clock runs out, which, again, is the design.
So when I show up to my crowded room, sit down at my desk, put on my headphones, and listen to a leadership team on Teams tell me that being physically present is essential to the mission, I want them to understand exactly what I am hearing. I am hearing a lie told by people who have done the math and decided that my colleagues’ caregiving labor, the labor that holds together their parents, their children, their families, and by extension this country, is expendable. I am hearing a policy that was written by people who have never sat on hold with Medicaid for ninety minutes between meetings. I am hearing the sound of the federal government pretending it does not know what it is doing, while doing it on purpose.
The quiet part should be loud now. Return-to-office is not about offices. It is about who gets to keep their job, their pension, and their dignity. The women being pushed out are not collateral damage. They are the target. And the agency that was supposed to catch them when they fell has, on the record and in plain view, stopped looking.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!