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Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor, the key driver of President Donald Trump’s return-to-office agenda, admitted in a hot mic moment that he intentionally filmed a video in front of a blank wall while he was working from home so he wouldn’t get blowback over working at home.
In an audio recording of an Aug. 18 all-hands agency meeting exclusively reviewed by Fortune, Kupor asks OPM communications team member Kiki Nyoh if it looks like he filmed the most recent “Federal Friday” video (part of a periodic video series where Kupor offers updates from the agency on social media) as if it looked “like I was stuck in a jail cell.” A source confirmed to Fortune it was Kupor who made the remarks.
“I was in my bedroom, but I was trying to find—because I knew someone was going to give me shit if like, they knew, ‘You were out of the office.’”
“I was trying to find something that was not recognizable as being in my house, basically,” Kupor says in the recording. “So I was just trying to find a plain corner with a white wall, which was not that easy to find.”
In response to Fortune’s request for comment, Nyoh said Kupor would not be considered to be teleworking, as he was out of office.
“Director Kupor was out of office that day. He works around the clock, including nights and weekends,” Nyoh told Fortune. She said OPM has made “important efforts [in] restoring a high-performance based work culture and championing merit in the federal workforce.”
The Trump administration has heavily pushed for federal employees to return-to-office. In an executive order on Trump’s first day in office in 2025, the White House directed agencies to “take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.”
In an all-staff email sent in January 2025, then-OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell said OPM employees should report to work on-site, full-time beginning on March 3. Ezell said employees on a telework or remote work agreement within 50 miles of an agency facility should work in-office full-time on the same deadline.
Between January and October 2025, full-time telework and remote work hours across the federal workforce decreased by more than 75%, according to data released by OPM. According to a source, OPM is still sharing management-directed reassignments (MDRs) to previously remote employees to move them back into physical offices.
Kupor, head of the government’s chief human resources agency since July 2025, has publicly argued even jobs conducive to remote work can be impeded by working from home.
“Even for jobs that can be done largely in isolation, that productivity can be impacted by distractions that pervade at the home,” Kupor wrote in a January 2026 blog post entitled “Why Showing Up Counts.” “Supervising a massive, largely remote federal workforce is not something the federal government is well equipped to do.”
Kupor, 54, joined OPM from Andreessen Horowitz, where he was a managing partner for 16 years, as well as the first hire of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in 2009. He joins a host of former Silicon Valley investors in the Trump administration, including a16z alum Sriram Krishnan, now the senior White House AI policy advisor, and Gregory Barbaccia, the cheif information officer at the Office of Management and Budget, who was previously at Palantir.
Federal employees have largely disagreed with the administration’s return-to-office push and assertions that it improves working conditions. According to the Federal News Network 2026 return-to-office survey of 7,463 federal workers, more than 53% of respondents said their overall work experience after returning to office was very negative, with another 30% calling it somewhat negative. About 17% called the experience somewhat or very positive, and 10% were neutral or unsure. Nearly 93% of workers said their work-life balance was “much worse” or somewhat worse since returning to in-person work.
“This has caused a lot of resignations, as it has made it hard to manage work-life balance. There is no need for my position to physically be at work every day,” one respondent said. “Will there ever be a time that employees matter again?”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
