President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to remove employees of the federal government who refuse to return to the office.
Trump made the pronouncement on Monday at a press conference at his home in Palm Beach, Florida. The incoming president said he would take the issue to court if necessary, challenging a Biden-led labor contract that locked in a remote work arrangement for tens of thousands of federal employees.
“If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed… And somebody in the Biden administration even gave a five-year waiver of that so that for five years people don’t have to come back into the office,” Trump said, per Bloomberg.
“It’s ridiculous. So it was like a gift to a union.”
The remote work arrangement was included as a provision in a contract between the Social Security Administration and 42,000 workers represented by the American Federation of Government Employees. Depending on the job, some workers were only required to work in the office as little as twice a week.
Trump supporter and the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, Elon Musk, has long criticized work-from-home arrangements. In 2022, The Dallas Express reported that Musk sent an email to his executive staff at Tesla stating that employees can only work from home after having completed a minimum of 40 hours in person.
As the appointed head of DOGE, alongside former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk has been taking aim at the lack of in-person work being done by employees working for the federal government.
“If you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%! Almost no one,” Elon Musk posted on his social media platform X on December 5.
Last year, The Dallas Express detailed how Americans in the private sector were increasingly returning to the office after a long hiatus of work-from-home prompted by pandemic shutdowns. Each year, American taxpayers spend $5 billion leasing office buildings. Another $2 billion is also spent operating and maintaining these buildings, regardless of their utilization.