Washington The almost two-thirds of federal employees who are still permitted to work from home, eighteen months after the pandemic ended, may be the first targets of Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk’s new initiative to improve government efficiency.
In downtown Washington, vacant government office space is expensive to maintain and a major source of annoyance for Mayor Muriel Bowser. She told reporters last week that encouraging federal employees to return to downtown Washington is at the top of her agenda and that she had asked to meet with President-elect Donald Trump.
One major concern is how to ensure that our federal personnel returns to work, Bowser stated, adding that she hopes to collaborate with the federal government to revitalize our community.
The Office of Management and Budget reports that around 10% of all federal employees are entirely remote, and 60% of telework-eligible employees are in the office. There are about 2.2 million government employees in the United States overall.
Ramaswamy told Tucker Carlson that he intended to take a chainsaw and a jackhammer to the federal government when Trump won the election, beginning with making public servants go back to work.
He answered, “They don’t go to work.” You don’t even need to mention that you’re part of a mass departure or termination. Simply inform them that they must return five days a week between 8 and 6 p.m.
That, according to Ramaswamy, would result in a 25% reduction in federal bureaucracy.
More than half of government occupations do not allow for remote work, according to Jacqueline Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents over 700,000 workers.
She further contended that Musk’s and Ramaswamy’s assertions are overblown.
This covers all of the medical staff at VA clinics and hospitals as well as the Bureau of Prisons’ prison officers,” she told NBC News. “And Border Patrol agents and federal air marshals and people who inspect slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.”
The expense of surplus federal office space has become a concern as the number of employees in the office has decreased. The Government Accountability Office came to the conclusion last year that, on average, barely 25% of the office space was utilized by 17 of the 24 largest federal agencies.
The utilization rate was even lower at 16% for the Education Department, which is at the top of Musk and Ramaswamy’s list of agencies that should be eliminated.
According to the OMB, 98% of Education Department workers were eligible to work from home as of August, and over half were doing so. The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources department, had one of the lowest office use rates, at just 9%.
According to Simon, letting some employees work from home helps the federal government attract and keep talented employees who must compete with the private sector despite lower pay.
In an effort to encourage civil servants to return to their jobs, President Joe Biden mandated in August 2023 that all federal employees work at least half of each two-week pay period.
Ironically, even before the coronavirus outbreak, the federal government promoted remote employment. President George W. Bush viewed it as a means of guaranteeing that employees could remain online and continue working in the event of an emergency following the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
Just over 750,000 federal employees were allowed to work from home in 2004. The number has almost doubled to 1.3 million since then.
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