Surge in virus hits EPA regional offices

New regional surges in coronavirus cases forced the Environmental Protection Agency to put on hold some of the earliest planned returns of federal employees to their offices, while the first volunteers at a few other federal agencies are quietly going back to their desks.

The Trump administration’s guidance, called “Opening up America Again,“lays out specific conditions for calling workers back, like 14 straight days of downward-trending cases in an area. But there have been complaints that the administration is moving too quickly.

On Monday, small numbers of Energy Department headquarters staff returned to offices in Washington, D.C., and Germantown, Tennessee, spokeswoman Jessica Szymanski said.

Less than 4% of the agency’s 7,000 federal and contractor workers were expected to return to work in this first phase of the administration’s plans, Szymanski said. This initial phase allows for voluntary returns of staffers.

The State Department said Monday that it expects to start its in-office restaffing on June 15, also with voluntary returns of employees. The Agriculture Department brought back all political appointees in the Washington area at large on June 1.

Many federal workers, like Americans in general and people around the world, have worked from home since mid- to late March, as the coronavirus spread. Essential federal employees stayed in the field, and the IRS early on become one of the first agencies to ask some workers to come back to offices, to handle taxes and taxpayers.

President Donald Trump earlier publicly urged reopening of some federal sites, including national parks, as a sign of “our significant progress against the invisible enemy” of coronavirus. That was in late April, as U.S. coronavirus deaths were climbing on their way past 100,000.

The EPA had some regional offices on track for the start of the phased return of federal employees. Agency officials put that on abrupt hold for Boston and Dallas regional offices Friday, citing increases in coronavirus infections in those cities, according to agency documents obtained by the Associated Press.

Sixteen other office sites, labs and other spaces in Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, Montana, Idaho and Washington are in an early phase of the agency’s restaffing plans, spokeswoman Angela Hackel said.

Union officials said that could mean mandatory return of workers in some parts of the country — Seattle, Atlanta, Denver and suburban Kansas City — by early July.

Hackel said the agency was taking a “measured and deliberate approach,” reviewing each site’s status weekly using case data and state and local reopening plans.

But a government watchdog group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, accuses the agency of moving forward with reopening offices in some cities even though all the set conditions, such as the availability of testing for the coronavirus, hadn’t been met.

In Chicago, an EPA union official wrote the agency Monday to ask bosses to put reopening planning on hold.