People that work "in the field" don't need a home office. I know a hydrologist who now has to go to the office, when much of his work is travelling around sampling groundwater. Another person I know works at OSHA, where she also travels to various work sites, but now has to go into the home office. Ridiculous waste of travel to have to go the the home office only to then leave to go somewhere else.

Everyone did this during COVID. Either got rid of office space or didn't add any to keep up with demand, because N% of staff was now remote.

I saw this at Google before I left in 2021. Doesn't surprise me that gov't has the same problem. Desks that could only be reserved/booked, not owned. Insufficient desks if everyone had to come back. They clearly didn't see WFH as temporary, even though RTO was clearly the long term plan.

Other bigcorps are the same from what I hear. Facilities got all messed up.

That’s how remote works. People don’t have a physical office because they work from home or another location.

with WFH it doesn't seem very weird to me? why have the central office if the work is getting done anyway

The US-government is interspersed with oligarchs who want to diminish the ability of the government to actually act so that they can argue why everything should be privatized.