Late last month, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, a.k.a. the leaders of Donald Trump’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, wrote an op-ed proposing that the federal government fire any federal employees who won’t work in the office five days a week, suggesting this as a way to help slash $2 trillion from the budget. Given that nearly half the workforce is eligible to work from home at least part of the week, the consequences of such a policy would obviously be massive and presumably result in a level of brain drain that would negatively impact the government. Yet it would appear that the president-elect is at least partially on board with the idea.
At a press conference with reporters on Monday, Trump said that his administration would go to court to fight a deal Joe Biden’s administration reached with the Social Security Administration’s union that allows employees to telework part of the week through 2029. Calling the agreement “terrible” and “ridiculous,” the incoming president said, “It was like a gift to a union, and we’re going to obviously be in court to stop it.” He added that federal employees who don’t return to working in the office will be fired: “If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed.” Under the terms of the current deal, SSA employees must work in the office between two and five days a week.
In their op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy wrote that “requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome. If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the COVID-era privilege of staying home.” In 2022, Musk 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 he issued the edict, Tesla still did not “have the room or resources to bring all its employees back to the office.”
An August report from the Office of Management and Budget showed that approximately 1.1 million federal (civilian) employees, or nearly half the workforce, are eligible to work from home for at least part of the week, with an additional 280,000 in fully remote positions; in other words, should Trump implement Musk and Ramaswamy’s proposal, more than 1 million people, if they choose not to work in the office five days a week, could be fired.
