Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on Wednesday floated ending work-from-home privileges for federal employees as part of their effort to trim the size of government.
The two entrepreneurs, tasked by President-elect Donald Trump last week to lead the newly formed “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), suggested in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that eliminating remote work would result in mass resignations that would help them achieve their goal of a smaller, more efficient, government.
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote.
“If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” they added.
Roughly 1.1 million federal employees – nearly half of the government’s civilian workforce – are eligible for telework, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
About 228,000 employees, or 10% of civilian personnel, work fully remote with “no expectation that they [work] in-person on any regular or recurring basis,” the agency noted in an August 2024 report.
The report was released two years after President Biden, in his 2022 State of the Union address, declared that “The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.”
Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX, Tesla and X, and Ramaswamy, the founder of pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences, argue that Trump has the authority to “curtail administrative overgrowth” through several means, including “large-scale firings,”relocating “federal agencies out of the Washington area” and scrapping remote work.
The two men revealed that DOGE plans “to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required” for the agency to “perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions.”
Musk and Ramaswamy noted that the fired federal workers will be “treated with respect” and that “DOGE’s goal is to help support their transition into the private sector.”
“The president can use existing laws to give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit,” they said.