The numbers come first. Full-time telework and remote work hours across the federal workforce fell by more than 75% between January and October 2025, according to data released by the Office of Personnel Management. The man most responsible for that shift, OPM Director Scott Kupor, has now been caught on a hot mic explaining how he disguised his own home backdrop to avoid scrutiny.
In an audio recording of an Aug. 18 all-hands agency meeting exclusively reviewed by Fortune, Kupor asks OPM communications team member Kiki Nyoh whether his most recent 'Federal Friday' video looked 'like I was stuck in a jail cell.' A source confirmed to Fortune that 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,'' Kupor says in the recording. 'I was trying to find something that was not recognizable as being in my house, basically. So I was just trying to find a plain corner with a white wall, which was not that easy to find.'
Nyoh, responding on behalf of Kupor, told Fortune that he 'was out of office that day' and 'works around the clock, including nights and weekends,' and therefore would not be considered to be teleworking. She added that OPM has made 'important efforts [in] restoring a high-performance based work culture and championing merit in the federal workforce.'
Kupor, 54, joined OPM as its director and came to the role from Andreessen Horowitz, where he had been a managing partner for 16 years and was the firm's first hire, brought on by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in 2009. He is part of a broader cohort of former Silicon Valley investors now serving in the Trump administration, including a16z alum Sriram Krishnan, now the senior White House AI policy advisor, and Gregory Barbaccia, chief information officer at the Office of Management and Budget, previously at Palantir.
On his first day in office in 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing 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.' Shortly after, then-OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell issued an all-staff email requiring OPM employees to report on-site full-time beginning March 3, 2025, with the same deadline applying to any employee on a telework or remote work agreement within 50 miles of an agency facility.
Kupor has been an outspoken defender of the policy. In a January 2026 blog post titled 'Why Showing Up Counts,' he wrote: 'Even for jobs that can be done largely in isolation, that productivity can be impacted by distractions that pervade at the home. Supervising a massive, largely remote federal workforce is not something the federal government is well equipped to do.'
Federal workers, for their part, have rendered their own verdict. According to the Federal News Network 2026 return-to-office survey of 7,463 federal workers, more than 53% said their overall work experience after returning to the office was very negative, with another 30% calling it somewhat negative. Nearly 93% said their work-life balance was 'much worse' or somewhat worse since returning to in-person work.
The principle at stake is straightforward: accountability must run in both directions. The Trump administration's RTO push is a legitimate exercise in restoring discipline and supervisory control over a sprawling federal bureaucracy — one that taxpayers fund and that spent years operating with minimal oversight. But credibility is the currency of any management directive. When the official championing 'showing up' stages a blank wall to conceal where he is working, the message to the workforce is muddied. The policy is sound; the optics hand critics an easy target. Capital rewards clear rules, and so do employees — but only when leadership applies them to itself first.
