Talk about tricky. Some jobs lend themselves to partial remote, ergo coming in not at all or 2-3 days per week. I see no reason to get rid of that op.
On the other hand, firing a federal worker can be much more difficult than in the private sector. Interesting to see how this goes down.
Maybe Ram and Elon figure it's easier to force a mass of workers to resign (in office mandates) vs the red tap required to fire them.
Musk, Ramaswamy Want Federal Workers in the Office Full Time. There’s a Hitch.
The move, aimed at thinning the civil-servant workforce, could come soon after Trump’s inauguration, a person close to the effort says
By John McCormick and Te-Ping Chen, WSJ
Nov. 20, 2024 5:34 pm ET
The nation’s largest workforce could soon be ordered back to the office full-time.
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to slash government bureaucracy and appointed uber-wealthy entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the efficiency effort. The two men have already targeted remote workers, saying that requiring federal employees back to the office five days a week would result in a welcome wave of voluntary terminations.
“If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece published Wednesday.
Ending remote work is being considered a potential early action item for the new administration shortly after the Jan. 20 inauguration, said a person working closely with the effort.
Still, that outcome is far from certain.
Of the 2.3 million civilian federal workers—nearly 30% of whom are veterans—more than half already work in-person because of the nature of their jobs, such as food-safety inspectors and healthcare workers, according to a 2024 Office of Management and Budget report. The rest, who are eligible to work remotely some of the time, perform an average 61% of their hours in the workplace. In U.S. Census Bureau surveys, federal and private-sector employees work roughly the same amount of time in person versus remotely.
The newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency, the advisory group Musk and Ramaswamy have been appointed to lead, doesn’t necessarily have direct power to issue such a mandate. Federal worker union leaders said changes to working conditions should be negotiated in collective bargaining.
Unions are gearing up to counter such efforts. The National Federation of Federal Employees, which represents 110,000 federal workers, has been consulting with its legal team, said the union’s national president, Randy Erwin. It also plans to lobby members of Congress and is holding town halls with members concerned about full-time office mandates and job cuts.
“We’re rallying them and getting prepared for a really, really big fight,” he said.
Predicting a tsunami of resignations
Ramaswamy, a biotech company founder who unsuccessfully challenged Trump for the GOP nomination, and Musk, who spent more than $100 million to help send Trump back to the White House, are both close to the president-elect. Their words would carry weight with cabinet picks.
Trump’s transition team didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. In an interview with the Journal last week, Ramaswamy suggested federal workers should be worried about their jobs.
“We’ll want to be reasonable, as compassionate as we can, at the level of individuals,” he said. “But at the level of permanently downsizing the scope of the bureaucracy, that is obviously going to have some consequences.”
Ramaswamy predicted in a post on X that up to 25% of civil servants would leave in the event of a full-time office mandate.
Though some companies, including Amazon and Dell, have recently ordered staff back to offices full time, most U.S. companies offer some flexibility on where employees work, according to data from Flex Index, which tracks the policies of more than 6,300 companies.
One exception is Musk’s business empire. He scrapped remote work at Tesla, SpaceX and X postpandemic, calling it “morally wrong.”
Roivant Sciences, the biotech firm Ramaswamy founded, mostly has in-person or hybrid workers. Ramaswamy hasn’t been involved with the company since he left its board in early 2023 for his presidential campaign, although he remains a shareholder.
‘Tremendous level of ignorance’
A five-day office mandate would roil some federal departments more than others. At the State Department, staffers eligible to work remotely already spend about 80% of their working hours on-site, according to the OMB report. At the Defense Department, the average is 64%. Workers at the Departments of Education, Treasury, and Housing and Urban Development perform between 36% and 39% of their hours at a work site.
A return-to-office push has the support of Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has urged President Biden to issue a clear directive telling federal workers to work in offices most of the time. Speaking to reporters last week, she said she had requested a meeting with Trump and the issue would be high on the agenda.
“How we can make sure that our federal workforce is back to work is one big thing,” Bowser said.
Most federal employees work across the country, providing vital services including support for veterans and national security, their union representatives say. Just one in 10 federal workers is fully remote.
How has the ability to work remotely changed your job or profession? Join the conversation below.
“These kinds of broadsides from Ramaswamy and Elon Musk show a really tremendous level of ignorance about the operations of the federal government,” said Jacqueline Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees. The union represents 800,000 federal and D.C. government workers.
Many employers in corporate America offer higher salaries and the ability to work on a hybrid or remote basis. Eliminating that option for federal workers would make it even harder to attract strong talent to public service, Simon said.
The ability to work remotely is also a boon for disaster preparedness, said the National Federation of Federal Employees’ Erwin. He noted that one of the most substantial pushes to support more telework for federal employees happened during the Bush administration after Sept. 11.
“All they want to do is cut the federal workforce and they see eliminating telework as a way to coerce people out of the federal government,” he said of the new government-efficiency effort. “They have no idea how harmful that can be to the country.”
Andrew Restuccia contributed to this article.
Write to John McCormick at mccormick.john@wsj.com and Te-Ping Chen at Te-ping.Chen@wsj.com
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