President Donald Trump’s (R) return-to-office mandate for federal workers did not affect Los Alamos National Laboratory personnel, who already work mainly on site, the lab’s director said on a virtual town hall Tuesday.
“Nobody’s making pits in their garage,” Thom Mason, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, said on the zoom call. “Everything has to be onsite.”
On Monday, Trump, hours after being sworn into office, signed an order largely ending remote work for federal workers.
Mason said Tuesday that because the mandate applied to federal government employees, Los Alamos workers, technically contractors, did not receive “any direction like that.”
He also said the laboratory deals with a lot of sensitive and classified material, so the mandate would not affect the workers regardless because much of the lab’s work is onsite. As with many places, Los Alamos has brought a lot of workers back to the offices.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, in late 2020 and early 2021, as many as 80% of lab employees worked remotely, according to data regularly provided to the Exchange Monitor by Los Alamos.
Trump also ordered a federal hiring freeze on Monday, but that likewise did not apply to the lab. At Los Alamos, hiring is “leveling off” but “not stopping,” Mason said Tuesday. He called 2023 the “peak hire year,” but said “we’re now tapering back this year.” Lab hiring has driven housing demand in Los Alamos County, the small, affluent jurisdiction surrounding the lab.
As hiring begins “tapering back,” Mason said the demand for housing growth is also shrinking, though he thinks “there are still some housing challenges.”
“I think there’s still going to be some needs in the community that are hopefully going to drive development, but it’s not that rapid pace we saw a couple years ago,” Mason said.
Jill Hruby, President Joe Biden’s NNSA administrator who resigned ahead of Trump’s inauguration along with most senior political appointees, in July said hiring at Los Alamos was tapering off.
“We’re not going to continue to grow the lab,” Hruby said at a Los Alamos town hall that summer. “They’ll still be hiring and replacing people who leave the laboratory, but not to grow the size of the laboratory.”
