Trump's/Elon's Contempt for Telework is Wrecking my Workplace

I just wanted to get this out there so people outside my coworkers know what's happening here.

I work in software development as a contractor doing government contracts for the military. Since many of my coworkers are government employees, there has been nothing but confusion regarding Trump's demand to cancel all telework options for federal workers. It's easily the sloppiest most opaque and anxiety inducing policy rollout I've ever seen and it's not even close. Our work has ground to a halt as people scramble to figure out how this will affect them and what they might need to do to protect themselves as a result. Keep in mind, all of this has happened within the span of one week:

First, we were told that these policies would not affect us, as Federal agencies responsible for national security (like, for instance, the military) were exempt and therefore our telework policy wouldn't change.

Then we were told that actually that's not true, these policies would affect us and in fact we would not be able to telework at all starting next week, which is an insanely fast rollout that gives very little time for us to react, prepare for it, or or adapt to it.

But then it came out that our building wouldn't actually have the space to accommodate everyone, since currently we have people working on different projects coming in only once or twice a week on different days - most cubicles/offices are shared by multiple people, but on different days so no one is stepping on each other's toes. So one person might have an office on Mondays and Wednesdays and another might have it Tuesdays and Thursdays, for instance. So it was unclear if we even could return, like, physically, and all we heard was that government workers would need to return soon and they want to bring contractors in full time too but expect that to be a longer process.

Then we got an email that basically said "okay I know it's not ideal but everyone needs to come back to the office actually, you're just going to need to share desks until we can figure out what to do about that", which made it seem like contractors actually would be forced back to the office along with government workers. We also received emails saying that we needed to bring all work equipment used for teleworking back to the office, implying that we may not even be able to telework in emergencies when it isn't safe to drive in to the office (and the official word about that was basically "we don't know if we'll have contingent telework options like that"). Our in house management told us to basically ignore that email though; apparently it was meant for other offices in our area that had shortages of equipment? Still pretty unclear on that.

Oh and meanwhile remember that there's the looming deadline for choosing whether or not to take the resignation option that provided six months of pay (maybe, there's some ambiguity there too) - that needed to be decided yesterday (2/7/25). Guess when the meeting they scheduled to clarify all of this confusion was? It's scheduled for today (2/8/25),one day after the resignation deadline...at the same time as another meeting some government workers needed to attend...so if you wanted to take the resignation option (which AFAIK is not available for contractors but idk that was never specified anywhere) then you'd need to do it before getting any clarification on what the hell is going on, which you might not even be able to get because of the timing conflicts with the meeting!

So my workplace is in chaos. People are in shock, very little actual work is getting done, and management is struggling to even make sense of how the Trump administration even wants this to be implemented. Literally everyone hates these policy changes even (especially?) management, both because they were very poorly planned/executed with a completely unreasonable deadline to figure out the logistics and because they're just making our lives shittier for no good reason. It doesn't take a genius to see that we've been teleworking just fine for years, and that all this is going to do is hurt morale and encourage our more talented workers to leave for jobs with better work life balance options. We've already had a few people take the resignation option, and plenty of others have stated they're actively looking for another job, and I'm considering doing so as well especially after the announcement that they're planning "sweeping layoffs" for federal employees that don't take the resignation deal.

As of now it's been confirmed to me that these changes don't currently apply to contractors like myself, but there has been absolutely no word on if they still plan to force us back to the office and, if so, what the estimated timeline for that would be. I don't know if I'll even still have a job in the near future, and my coworkers are in the same boat.

This is not normal. If Trump is to be taken at his word that these changes are to "streamline the workforce" or "improve the standards of performance" then they are objectively a laughable failure; they're literally doing exactly the opposite of that. If you assume that they know what they're doing, the question becomes what are they actually hoping to accomplish with these changes? Nothing good for us, that's for sure...