When Donald Trump announced that he was putting Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of his administration’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, he boldly claimed the initiative, under the duo’s tutelage, would become “The Manhattan Project of our time.” And a week and a half later, it’s become abundantly clear that the analogy is less about the smartest people in the world coming together to build something that will fundamentally alter life as we know it than it is about two guys indiscriminately dropping a bomb on America without actually thinking through the consequences.
The first clue came on Wednesday, when in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy revealed that their big idea to cut government waste and shrink the federal budget was to make everyone come into the office and fire those who refuse. “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” the two wrote. “If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.” Should federal employees be required to come into the office a few days a week? Maybe! Is having a blanket rule that says if they don’t come in every day they’ll be fired a smart idea? Probably not, at least when it comes to retaining people who actually know what they’re doing, and could easily find work elsewhere should the terms of their employment with the federal government become pointlessly draconian.
As NBC News notes, “The Biden administration ordered federal agencies in 2023 to ‘substantially increase meaningful in-person work,’ but it also left some flexibility in place, citing operational costs like office space, the need to recruit ‘top talent’ and other factors.” An August report from the Office of Management and Budget showed approximately 1.1 million federal (civilian) employees, or nearly half the workforce, are eligible for working from home at least part of the week, with an additional 280,000 in fully remote positions. Meaning, under Musk and Ramaswamy’s proposal, more than one million people, should they choose to say no to working in the office five days a week, could be canned.
If you’re wondering if the RTO edict floated by Team Trump is anything new for Musk, it’s not. In 2022, he ordered Tesla and SpaceX employees to report to the office for a minimum of 40 hours a week, though, according to CNBC, three months after the fact Tesla did not “have the room or resources to bring all its employees back to the office.”
In other DOGE news, last week the group called on “high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week” to do so for free.
A simple no would be a lot more reassuring here
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