VA secretary orders employees back to office after 18 employees take buyout offer to leave Spokane veterans hospital

WASHINGTON – The Department of Veterans Affairs on Friday ordered its employees to end remote work and return to the office in the coming months.

The directive comes after an internal email showed that 18 employees at Spokane’s VA hospital had accepted a buyout offer to leave their jobs as part of President Donald Trump’s effort to shrink the federal workforce.

In an email to the department’s employees obtained by The Spokesman-Review, VA Secretary Doug Collins said all employees – with the exception of those who are exempted due to a disability or another approved reason – must return to the office by May 5 if they live within 50 miles of a federal office space. Those who live farther away are given until July 28 to stop working remotely, and anyone who hasn’t complied with the order will be considered “absent without leave,” Collins wrote.

The VA has declined to say how many of its employees have opted for the “deferred resignation” offered as part of billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency. But according to a separate internal email sent to employees at Spokane’s Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center on Wednesday and obtained by The Spokesman-Review, 18 eligible employees opted to resign from the hospital while receiving pay through September.

Three more Mann-Grandstaff employees were terminated, according to the Wednesday email, as part of a wave of more than 1,000 firings of “probationary” workers who had been in their VA jobs for less than one or two years, depending on their role. In a news release announcing those terminations on Feb. 13, the department claimed the dismissals would save more than $98 million per year.

After that email reported that the three terminations at Mann-Grandstaff were “still up in the air” while the human resources department discussed whether they qualified as probationary employees, another email on Friday from an administrator indicated that two of the three terminated employees had been reinstated.

In another internal email circulated at the Spokane hospital on Thursday, Sam McComas, associate director for patient care services at Mann-Grandstaff, told employees that “around 115” of their colleagues had taken the buyout in the VA’s Northwest region, known as VISN 20.

Because federal employees from various agencies are scrambling to find available office space in the area to comply with the return-to-office order, McComas wrote, “There is a very large demand for work stations on all federal gov’t space – so please just be aware.”

“Most VA’s don’t have extra office furniture on hand, so configuration of new work spaces may be pretty bare bones to begin with,” he wrote. “We continue to get requests of federal employees within 50 miles of our facility looking for work spaces.”

Mann-Grandstaff and its affiliated clinics throughout the Inland Northwest employ the equivalent of 1,462 full-time employees – two people working half-time schedules count as one full-time worker, for instance – according to the hospital’s spokesman, Bret Bowers. The 18 departures would represent a reduction of about 1% of the workforce.

While that figure is far smaller than the cuts seen at other federal agencies, Mann-Grandstaff and its clinics have faced years of additional staffing challenges related to a troubled computer system that the VA has tested in the Inland Northwest since 2020, which has driven frustrated employees to move to other VA hospitals or leave the department entirely.

A major update to the electronic health record system was scheduled to begin Friday night, according to another internal email. While those semiannual “block” updates are intended to improve a system whose flaws have hobbled health care providers and contributed to patient harm, they have also occasionally introduced new problems.

The White House has said that roughly 75,000 federal workers opted for the deferred resignation offer before it expired. A federal judge in Massachusetts, after temporarily pausing the offer, allowed it to go forward in a ruling on Feb. 12. The offer, described in an email titled “Fork in the Road” that mirrored an email Musk sent to employees of the social media company then known as Twitter after he bought it in 2022, could face other legal and practical challenges, in part because Congress has only funded the government until March 14.