By TIM REID, TED HESSON, SARAH N. LYNCH and LEAH DOUGLAS Reuters
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WASHINGTON — At NASA headquarters in Washington, just a mile from the U.S. Capitol, employees returned to an infestation of cockroaches and some are working in chairs with no desks, according to two people familiar with conditions there.

In a private chat, staffers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services likened the hunt for desks in some regional offices to “The Hunger Games,” the popular series of novels and films where young people must fight to the death in a government-sanctioned contest.

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And at an Internal Revenue Service office in Memphis, Tennessee, tax assessors sharing a training room are unable to discuss sensitive tax matters with clients over the phone out of fear of breaching privacy laws, according to one IRS manager who spoke to Reuters.

Hundreds of thousands of U.S. federal government employees, many of whom have been working from home since the COVID-19 pandemic, were ordered back to their offices full-time by President Donald Trump on January 20.

But many have arrived at workplaces unprepared for their return, according to 10 federal workers who spoke to Reuters.

The federal employees work inside eight different government agencies across the U.S. who have returned to their office buildings, sometimes after years of working remotely. All spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

Some critics of the move – including governance experts, federal union representatives and civil servants – have said the lack of preparation is no accident.

They see it as a deliberate effort to make offices so unpleasant to work in that it will force more government employees to resign. Trump wants to slash and reshape the 2.3-million strong federal civilian workforce.

Governance experts and labor unions say Trump’s return to office order is also emblematic of a wider problem with the way in which the Republican president and his top adviser, tech billionaire Elon Musk, are approaching the government overhaul.

“It’s the move fast and break things approach, without really thinking through the implications of a range of different choices you are making,” said Pam Herd, a professor of social policy at the University of Michigan. “So they tell everyone to return to work without considering the fact that they don’t have the space to accommodate everyone.”

Trump and Musk have insisted their goal is to make the U.S. government bureaucracy less costly for taxpayers and more efficient, and to eliminate waste and fraud.

A spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources department, said the goal of Trump’s return-to-office order is for federal employees to work efficiently to best serve the American people.

“We are prioritizing in-person work to strengthen collaboration, accountability, and service delivery across the federal workforce,” an OPM spokesperson said.

A White House official said in response to Reuters questions that facilities staff at the General Services Administration, which manages federal real estate, “work tirelessly to address reported issues to a satisfactory outcome.”

A spokesperson for Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency did not respond to a request for comment.

While most of the workers are returning to workplaces they left at the start of the 2020 pandemic, many others are teleworkers who had been working full-time from home or had a hybrid schedule that meant they worked only part of the time in an office.

Federal employees described fights for desks and chairs, internet outages, a lack of parking spaces, with some sitting on floors and others told to use their personal smartphone hotspots to gain computer access to government data.