Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor, the key driver of President Donald Trump’s return-to-office agenda, admitted in a hot mic moment that he intentionally filmed a video in front of a blank wall while he was working from home so he wouldn’t get blowback over working at home.
In an audio recording of an Aug. 18 all-hands agency meeting exclusively reviewed by Fortune, Kupor asks OPM communications team member Kiki Nyoh if it looks like he filmed the most recent “Federal Friday” video (part of a periodic video series where Kupor offers updates from the agency on social media) as if it looked “like I was stuck in a jail cell.” A source confirmed to Fortune 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.’”
“I was trying to find something that was not recognizable as being in my house, basically,” Kupor says in the recording. “So I was just trying to find a plain corner with a white wall, which was not that easy to find.”
In response to Fortune’s request for comment, Nyoh said Kupor would not be considered to be teleworking, as he was out of office.
“Director Kupor was out of office that day. He works around the clock, including nights and weekends,” Nyoh told Fortune. She said OPM has made “important efforts [in] restoring a high-performance based work culture and championing merit in the federal workforce.”
Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/08/20/opm-director-scott-kupor-record-video-blank-wall-work-from-home-return-to-office/?utm_source=reddit/
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