(Adnkronos) – “There won’t even be talk of mass layoffs, we’ll just tell them they have to go back to the office five days a week from eight to six.” This is how Vivek Ramaswamy, the other tech billionaire who, together with Elon Musk, will lead the department for government efficiency, the Doge, said that he will force federal employees who currently “don’t go to work” but continue, 18 months after the end of the pandemic, to take advantage of smart working to varying degrees to return to work in person.
Interviewed by the far-right host, and Trump loyalist, Tucker Carlson, the biotech entrepreneur confirmed that his and Musk’s task will be to use “the jackhammer and the electric saw” to revolutionize, and drastically cut, the federal apparatus. And he says he is convinced that by removing the possibility of remote working “25% of the federal bureaucracy will be reduced”.
Currently – Nbcnews recalls – there are 1.3 million federal employees, out of a total of 2.2 million, who can work remotely, 10% of them totally remotely, while the rest, since August 2023, have to go to the office at least half the days of a two-week work period. Musk’s intolerance for remote work, which he branded as “morally wrong,” is well known: in June 2022, at the height of the pandemic, he forced Tesla employees to work in person at least 40 hours a week. And he did the same thing immediately after taking control of Twitter, now X, in October of the same year.
However, the two billionaires’ crusade against federal employees working remotely could find an unexpected ally in the Democratic mayor of Washington D.C., who has been asking for help for some time to bring “life back to the center of our city” where for years now a large part of the buildings housing federal departments have been empty. “How to get our federal workers back into offices is a big issue,” said the mayor, who has already requested a meeting with Donald Trump to work together toward this goal.
According to the Government Accountability Office, last year 17 of the 24 major federal agencies used only 25% of their space. And there are correspondences between the lists of these buildings and the one on which Musk and Ramaswamy intend to drop their axe, starting with the Department of Education, which uses only 16% of its space, with 98% of employees who can work from home and more than half who actually do.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the union of federal employees with over 700,000 members, dismissed the claims of the Doge’s future leaders as exaggerated, recalling that over half of federal jobs – in health care, safety, border protection and food security – do not involve smart working. And they point out that allowing partial work from home allows the federal government to recruit and retain talent despite significantly lower wages than the private sector.
