Five years since the pandemic began, workers have grown accustomed to a script. Their bosses make return-to-office plans, which then get shelved. And then shelved again.

In recent weeks, the calls to end remote work have come back with gusto, and with authority.

On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order requiring federal department heads to “terminate remote work arrangements” and require all federal workers to return to in-person work five days a week. He previewed the move in December when he said those federal workers who refused to go into the office were “going to be dismissed.”

Some chief executives, who have long been enthusiastic about ditching remote work, have also announced full return-to-office plans. Amazon, JPMorgan and AT&T told many employees they would have to be back in the office five days a week this year. Even in popular culture, the office is making a comeback, with “Babygirl” glamorizing the blouse wearing C.E.O., “Severance” returning for a new season probing corporate psychological drama, and buzzy newsletters like “Feed Me” declaring remote work “out.”

And some workers, who have come back to in-person work of their own volition, are eager to pick up their prepandemic work routines.

Two years ago, Ellen Harwick would have said she wanted to work remotely forever. Last fall, a switch flipped.

A marketing manager for an apparel brand in Bellingham, Wash., Ms. Harwick worked remotely for two weeks in Portugal while still working on Pacific time. Suddenly, she began to crave office chatter.

“Something just shifted for me,” said Ms. Harwick, 48. “Working from home was really novel for the first bit, and then I just felt isolated.” She is now back in the office five days a week.

But many proponents of remote work, who underscore the benefits it offers to people with caregiving responsibilities, voiced concern about flexibility evaporating entirely.

“It’s very challenging to find child care that allows you to be in the office 9 to 5,” said Sara Mauskopf, the chief executive and founder of Winnie, a start-up that connects families with child care providers. Her company is fully remote.

Amazon’s return to office began on Jan. 2, when the company instructed most workers to come in five days a week, up from the three days required as of May 2023. In some locations, the deadline has been postponed as the company reconfigures office space. Andy Jassy, the company’s chief executive, told employees in a memo that returning to the office would better allow workers to “invent, collaborate and be connected” to one another and to the company culture.

“Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward,” Mr. Jassy wrote.

JPMorgan told employees that in-person work would support better mentorship and brainstorming. The company will start rolling out its return to office in March.

“We know that some of you prefer a hybrid schedule and respectfully understand that not everyone will agree with this decision,” JPMorgan wrote in a memo to employees. “We feel that now is the right time to solidify our full-time in-office approach.”

Many work force experts point out that executives have wanted people back in the office for a while, for the purposes of building culture and relationships. What has changed, they say, is that employers feel they have more leverage now that the labor market is not quite as tight as it was at the height of the Great Resignation, when there were more open jobs for the number of unemployed people.

“It becomes like another dimension of compensation — in a really tight labor market, employees get their way more, employers might not pressure them to come back because they might want to quit,” said Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University. “In a labor market where there’s more slack, employers might be less worried about that.”

Sometimes a return-to-office push has less to do with building an office culture and more to do with cost. Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford University who studies remote work and advises executives on hybrid arrangements, said he had seen some companies press employees to return to the office as a way to reduce head count, understanding that calling all workers back would encourage some to quit.

“The waning of the D.E.I. movement has made it a bit easier,” added Mr. Bloom, referencing the backlash to corporate diversity initiatives, and explaining that women and employees of color have tended to voice more support for remote work in surveys.

In spite of these high-profile efforts to get workers back five days a week, many other employers are holding on to a hybrid approach.

Data from a Stanford project tracking work-from-home rates shows that over one-quarter of paid full days in the United States are worked remotely. And about three-quarters of Americans whose jobs can be done remotely continue to work from home some of the time, according to Pew.

One of the reasons that hybrid work has remained so sticky is that workers have made clear their preference for flexibility. Nearly half of remote workers surveyed by Pew said they would consider leaving their jobs if their employers no longer allowed them some remote flexibility. At Amazon, corporate workers staged a walkout in May 2023 protesting R.T.O. Some employers said they had no plans to change course from hybrid arrangements.

“We are committed to providing flexibility to the work force and believe the hybrid-flex approach allows teams to collaborate intentionally,” said Claire Borelli, the chief people officer at TIAA, an investment firm that called its employees back to the office three days a week in March 2022.

Some remote work stalwarts say that the policy has had no impact on productivity and that it has helped employee retention. When Yelp’s lease came up for renewal in 2021, the company decided to shift locations and sublease a smaller space from Salesforce. The company now allows employees to work fully remotely, bucking broader return-to-office trends.

“At this point, we almost drop the descriptor of remote work — it’s just the way we work,” said Carmen Amara, the company’s chief people officer.

Ms. Amara said any skepticism the company faced over its remote policy went away because of bottom-line results. The company reported record net revenue and profitability in the last quarter of 2024, as well as a 13 percent decrease in turnover since 2021.

But with big names like Amazon and JPMorgan returning to the office in full force, and with President Trump insisting that the federal work force do the same, the commercial real estate industry is tentatively optimistic, according to Ruth Colp-Haber, the chief executive of Wharton Property Advisors, a real estate brokerage.

Office occupancy is still shaky — a little over half of what it was prepandemic — according to Kastle, a workplace security firm whose “return-to-office” barometer has reflected the ups and downs of remote work since 2020. But that is up from what it was in 2022.

“These things take a while to work their way into the numbers, but there’s no question the momentum is on the positive side,” Ms. Colp-Haber said. “For a variety of reasons, one of them being the push by big companies to have five days a week back in the office, we’re seeing greater demand for office space.”

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is likely to be given office space in the West Wing, putting him close to President Trump as Mr. Musk steers a project that aims to cut as much as $2 trillion in government spending, two people with knowledge of the planning said on Monday.

Mr. Musk had been expected to be situated in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is in the White House complex but not in the West Wing proper. But he has for many days been asking about his level of access, signaling a desire for proximity to Mr. Trump, according to the people.

Mr. Trump had wanted Mr. Musk to have the space, one of the people said. Mr. Musk has been given a badge for the White House complex and was said to be working there on Monday. He has filled out paperwork to be brought onboard for the role and already has a government email address.

Trump officials and an official with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting project that Mr. Musk leads, did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Musk spent time on Sunday at the Washington headquarters of his rocket company, SpaceX, before speaking at Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Monday. His government-cutting team has largely spent the past two months at the company’s downtown offices, joined by a number of engineers who hail from Silicon Valley and are planning to be dispersed across the federal government, with a goal of placing about two people at each major agency.

At least some of these employees carry navy blue mesh baseball caps in all-white capital letters reading “DOGE,” as Mr. Musk’s project is informally known.

Many aspects related to Mr. Musk’s efforts have been shrouded in secrecy. It remains unclear whether he is going to become a “special government employee” for his project to recommend dramatic cuts to federal programs. The Department of Government Efficiency is not an official department.

His allies have been considering his options over the last several weeks, with an eye on making sure that he is minimally restricted by ethics laws. The question of Mr. Musk’s formal status carries legal ramifications because different rules apply when government work is performed by private citizens or by officials.

The different legal categories include conflict-of-interest restrictions for government employees that could be significant since Mr. Musk’s companies have billions of dollars in government contracts, and requirements about when deliberations may be kept confidential or must be performed in public view that could affect the rollout and reaction to his proposed cuts.

Mr. Musk has already played a major role in placing personnel throughout the federal government, including in areas that overlap with his businesses. His allies have been interviewing candidates for senior jobs at agencies including the Pentagon and State Department. And Mr. Musk has weighed in personally on key roles. He successfully pushed for Troy Meink to be chosen as secretary of the Air Force, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation.

Mr. Meink ran the Pentagon’s National Reconnaissance Office, which helped Mr. Musk secure a multibillion-dollar contract for SpaceX to help build and deploy a spy satellite network for the federal government.

A priority for Mr. Musk has been avoiding triggering a law that requires advisory committees that include private citizens to conduct their work in public view. Becoming a special government employee could be a step toward doing that.

While special government employees must fill out financial disclosure forms, that status comes with more flexible rules than what is required of regular officials. In particular, Mr. Musk, one of Mr. Trump’s top financial supporters, could avoid any public release of such information if he took no salary.

A federal ethics law aimed at preventing conflicts of interest generally makes it a crime for any government employees, including special temporary ones, to participate in official matters in which they, their families or their organizations have a financial interest.

SpaceX has contracts with the government to send astronauts and satellites into space. Mr. Musk’s Tesla electric car company is affected by government policies like subsidies to encourage more production of batteries and chargers inside the United States and to make it easier for consumers to buy such vehicles.

Under the ethics law’s terms, however, Mr. Trump could exempt Mr. Musk from that limit by granting him a written waiver.

Despite the restrictions that come with official status, if not only Mr. Musk but all of his staff members on the project become regular or special government employees, the effort could avoid triggering other legal issues. Many recruits for the cost-cutting project are expected to be formal members of existing departments, not special government employees.

In particular, the project might be able to avoid the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which regulates boards, panels, councils and other types of committees that work with people from outside the government to provide advice to the executive branch.

That law says that all meetings of such committees are to be conducted in public, and all the documents submitted to such a panel or produced by it are also supposed to be available to the public.