20. Department of Veterans Affairs · Notable
Review VA hybrid and remote work and restore in-person presence
Printed page 651 20. Department of Veterans Affairs
“Take a close and analytically critical look at where hybrid and remote work is a net positive as a functional necessity and where in-person collaboration and presence will help to instill a strong work ethic and a more cohesive environment for productivity from the Office of the Secretary across the headquarters enterprise.”
What has happened
- Done
The headquarters enterprise is back in person. VA's FY2027 congressional submission records that the Office of Human Resources and Administration "[d]eveloped enterprise-wide guidance to comply with the Return to In-Person Work Presidential Memorandum and issued [an] OCHCO bulletin that included [an] implementation action plan, processes, and procedures", and that it "[l]ed the facilities and space management efforts for the VACO campus" so that the seven buildings in the National Capital Region held enough offices and cubicles for the 18 VA Central Office organizations and "met the increase in demand from returning employees". The Office of the Secretary and the headquarters enterprise the Quote names are in person, and the collective-bargaining obstacle to extending it was removed when VA terminated union contracts for most bargaining-unit employees on 2025-08-06. Dated to the document that records the implementation as complete.
- Partially done
VA issued a return to in-person work policy two weeks into the term, following the Presidential Memorandum of 2025-01-20. More than 20% of VA's 479,000 employees then held telework or remote arrangements. The policy phased them out by category: political appointees, Senior Executive Service members and SES equivalents, senior level and scientific and professional employees became ineligible for remote work and had their telework agreements terminated by 2025-02-24; supervisors with duty stations within 50 miles of a VA facility by the same date; non-bargaining-unit employees within 50 miles by 2025-04-28. Arrangements outside 50 miles were not terminated and bargaining-unit requirements were deferred, with exceptions for reasonable accommodation, qualifying medical conditions and military spouses under permanent-change-of-station orders. A piece delivered rather than the whole ask, so `partial`: the categories are drawn by grade and distance, and Acting Secretary Todd Hunter's stated rationale was "treating all VA employees equally", not the functional-necessity analysis the Quote describes.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- Boundary call, raised for the consistency pass: done records the outcome the Quote wanted —
in-person presence restored from the Office of the Secretary across headquarters — while the
analytically critical review of where remote work is a net positive was never published. The
alternative reading holds the item at partial on the ground that the review half was never
done. The outcome reading is preferred because the Quote’s object is the hybrid and remote
work policy and its action is
restrict, and the policy is restricted. - The Federal Register carries nothing: a phrase search for “telework” across VA documents since 2025-01-20 returns zero.
- Related but not this ask: VA’s order suspending the application of section 1-402 or 1-404 of
EO 12171 (2025-04-17,
2025-06566) and its rescission (2025-11-13,2025-19867) concern collective-bargaining exclusions, and the union-contract terminations of 2025-08-06 (https://news.va.gov/press-room/va-terminates-union-contracts-for-most-bargaining-unit-employees/, fetched 2026-09-01) are about labor relations, not telework. They are carried here as the context in which bargaining-unit return-to-office became possible.
- Action
- restrict
- Object
- VA hybrid and remote work policy
- ID
- 1799