Vermont’s return-to-office blunder is costing the state millions

If anyone wants a clean example of how governments waste taxpayer money, Vermont just handed them one. Gov. Phil Scott’s (R) 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 had 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 its telework policy as effective since 2012. Current state employee contracts remain in force through June 30, 2026. And Vermont law, which makes it it an unfair labor practice to refuse to bargain collectively, is not coy about the employer’s obligations.  

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 that roughly 3,100 telework agreements had already been approved, with 44........

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