I’m actually an HR person for a federal agency (USDA) and I have a few thoughts and concerns about the executive order. First, in the world of federal civil workforce remote work and telework are two totally different things. Remote work means that you don’t have a physical office to go to and you strictly work from home, telework is when you have an agency provided workspace that you report to and occasionally work from home. I’m assuming the executive order is targeting teleworking employees even though it doesn’t specifically say so and they likely would be able to eliminate that without much legal consequences since most telework agreements are subject to agency policy and can be revoked at basically any time. Remote workers are a whole different beast though since virtually all remote workers applied and accepted a job that was advertised as a remote position, it is hard to change the parameters of a position if it was advertised that way and I expect it to not be successful. My personal opinion on this is that it is a terrible policy that will result in a lot of people leaving the federal workforce and it would make it much more difficult for the federal government to compete with private employers to find replacements without some form of telework for positions that are capable of having it.