When the Social Security Administration agreed to a five-year extension of work-from-home arrangements for tens of thousands of employees in early December, many at the agency expressed relief.

But the reprieve may be shortlived. At a news conference two weeks later, President-elect Donald Trump railed against the deal and said he would go to court to undo it.

“If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office,” he said, “they’re going to be dismissed.”

The back-and-forth previewed what is likely to be one of the earliest points of contention of Trump’s second administration. Over the past few years, many federal workers have organized their lives around hybrid arrangements that help them juggle work and family responsibilities and have gone so far as to demand that the Biden administration preserve the status quo. Some have rushed to join the roughly one-quarter to one-third of federal workers who are unionized so that telework policies will be negotiable.

But to Trump and his allies, the work-from-home arrangements are an example of liberal permissiveness run amok and a tantalizing opportunity to clear the federal government of obstructionist workers and to vastly shrink its reach.

In a Wall Street Journal column in November, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the businesspeople tapped to lead Trump’s government efficiency commission, said they would welcome “a wave of voluntary terminations” triggered by forcing federal employees to work from an office five days a week.

Many private-sector employers have recently announced such policies, arguing that in-person work improves communication and collaboration.

The looming collision has heightened the tension across Washington as Trump heads into his second term. One government employee involved in a union campaign seeking to preserve work-from-home arrangements said union officials worried that, as with the Social Security Administration, press coverage of the effort would put a target on the agency involved and inspire the Trump administration to crack down.

“We are not ready to discuss all of this publicly just yet,” said a representative of the union, the National Treasury Employees Union.

Trump will not be the first president to chafe at his employees’ attachment to working from home. The Obama administration adopted a policy making it easier for federal employees to work remotely, but it could not envision the scale that would become common during the pandemic. By 2022, President Joe Biden was seeking to dial it back.

Biden proclaimed in that year’s State of the Union address that “the vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person,” and his administration issued memos laying out a new approach in 2023. Whatever the substantive merits, it surely wasn’t lost on Biden that Republicans had made a political issue out of “bubble bath bureaucrats” who lounged around their homes at taxpayer expense, as a news release from Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, put it.

But change was slow to come. A study of federal buildings found that they were typically under one-third of their prepandemic occupancy in 2023. The White House chief of staff, Jeffrey D. Zients, repeatedly grumbled that “we don’t yet have the return-to-work levels that we should have,” as he said in an April 2024 interview. About 15% to 20% of civilian federal workers are based in the Washington area.

The attachment to working from home may reflect the sociology of the capital, which is filled with grinders who are passionate about their work.

“If I’m mission-driven, why would I want to waste two hours in the car?” said Kenneth Baer, an official at the Office of Management and Budget under President Barack Obama.

In 2023, after the Justice Department indicated that it would soon require employees to spend two or three days in the office a week on average, up from one, a group of department lawyers wrote to their leadership saying the shift would be self-defeating.

In anonymous testimonials, more than two dozen lawyers expressed enthusiasm for their work — “I love my job” was a common sentiment — and went into exquisite detail about the productivity gains that telework had brought by sparing them long commutes and office banter.

Several said they had effectively split the work-from-home dividend between themselves and the government: They did more work but also spent more time tending to children and their mental health. The testimonials align with a survey in mid-2020 by Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom and two colleagues, who found that the typical office worker saved about 80 minutes a day when working from home, about 40% of which was used to do more work. A recent Labor Department study found that industries with higher rates of remote work had larger increases in productivity.