Vermont’s Return to Office Blunder is Costing Millions

By Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

If anyone wants a clean example of how governments waste taxpayer money, Vermont just handed them one. Gov. Phil Scott’s return-to-office order was sold as a common-sense push for collaboration and better service. It has instead become a case study in how political theater can collide with labor law, management reality, and basic fiscal discipline. On April 1, the Vermont Labor Relations Board ruled that the administration unlawfully imposed its hybrid work standard without bargaining in good faith with the union. That should have been the end of the illusion. This was never a careful efficiency reform. It was an expensive gamble taken on the public’s dime.

What makes the fiasco especially foolish is that the state was not improvising in a legal vacuum. Telework in Vermont government was already an established working condition, not a perk handed out on a whim. In testimony to lawmakers in 2023, the state’s own human resources leadership described Telework Policy 11.9 as effective since 2012. The current VSEA contracts remain in force through June 30, 2026. And Vermont law is not coy about the employer’s obligations: 3 V.S.A. § 961 makes it an unfair labor practice to refuse to bargain collectively. Even if the administration believed it had broad managerial authority, it was walking straight into a legal dispute over a subject that plainly touched terms and conditions of employment.

That matters because this was not some marginal workplace tweak. The order affected roughly 3,000 state employees, many of whom had arranged their lives around remote or hybrid work that the state had allowed for years. The administration’s own 2023 presentation said about 3,100 telework agreements were already approved, with 44 percent of employees teleworking and an average remote schedule of 28 hours per week. This was a mature operating model. The state had data, experience, and an existing framework. Yet instead of bargaining over how to refine telework, officials chose a unilateral order that treated a long-settled arrangement like a management toy they could snap back into shape whenever they felt like it.

The result was predictable. When leaders ignore the rules, taxpayers do not get strength. They get liability. The labor board’s ruling means the state may have to unwind the policy, restore previous arrangements, and make workers whole for losses tied to the unlawful change. Even Scott himself acknowledged the danger, saying taxpayers could be on the hook for commuting, child care, and other costs associated with returning to the office. Think about how absurd that is. The administration forced employees back in, lost the legal fight, and now may have to reimburse the very costs it created. That is not a firm hand at the wheel. That is a taxpayer-funded loop of self-inflicted expense.

And the meter does not stop there. To support the mandate, the administration also committed the state to more office space in Waterbury. In November, VTDigger reported that the state had signed leases for an additional 22,000 square feet of privately owned office space, costing about $430,000 in the first year and roughly $2.3 million over five years. That spending was justified by the same return-to-office order the labor board has now found unlawful. So Vermont taxpayers may be stuck with a double burden: paying employees back for the costs of commuting to offices they did not need to be in, while also paying for office space the state may not need to keep.

This is exactly the kind of trap governments should be trying to avoid in a tight-budget environment. The Government Accountability Office has warned that underused office buildings carry recurring operating costs and that hybrid work creates a powerful reason for public employers to rethink, not expand, their footprints. Vermont’s mistake was to do the opposite. Rather than use the rise of telework to shrink fixed overhead, the state appears to have used a political crusade against remote work to justify new overhead. That is the fiscal logic of a teenager with a credit card.

The managerial case for the order was never especially convincing either. The state’s own employee engagement data, summarized in that same 2023 HR presentation, showed that telework or hybrid schedules ranked among the top reasons employees stayed and among the top reasons they might leave. Outside Vermont, the evidence has moved in the same direction. A large Stanford-led study found that workers on hybrid schedules were just as productive and just as likely to be promoted as those in the office full time, while resignations fell sharply. A serious administration would have used that evidence to bargain for targeted in-person requirements where they were truly needed. It would have matched office presence to mission, not to ideology.

Instead, Vermont got a one-size-fits-all order, a legal defeat, potential restitution, and new real estate obligations. That is not efficiency. It is performative management that leaves the public paying for the performance. The lesson here is bigger than one governor or one labor board ruling. When politicians try to make a cultural statement through the machinery of government, they often end up turning symbolic toughness into very real waste. Vermont taxpayers deserve a government that bargains before it dictates, measures before it leases, and solves problems before it creates bills. On this one, the Scott administration did the opposite in exactly the wrong order.

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