President-elect Donald Trump’s government efficiency commission has put its sights on teleworking federal employees.
Entrepreneur and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, along with tech mogul Elon Musk, has been put in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency.” The outside group is working on recommendations for the incoming Trump administration to cut out waste and fraud within agencies.
On Monday, Ramaswamy indicated that telework — which was expanded at several agencies during the Covid-19 pandemic — is on the chopping block for the federal workforce, and staffers will have to be on-site for the full work week.
“I’m hearing via allies that federal government unions are scrambling to update their collective bargaining agreements to avoid getting fired,” Ramaswamy said on X. “The prospect of being asked to return to the office 5 days per week like most working Americans apparently has them ‘in tears.'”
The Biden administration has pushed for federal employees to work from the office more. An Office of Management and Budget report released earlier this year found telework-eligible employees spent 61.2 percent of regular hours working in person.
Use of telework, however, is prevalent at many agencies and federal unions have fought to secure that right for their members. For example, American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, EPA’s largest union, secured in its recent contract for employees having report to the office twice during a two-week pay period.
Those contracts would have to be renegotiated to accommodate the efficiency commission’s recommendations, which will take time.
The commission, which has its final report due July 4, 2026, is likely to recommend more than just telework to be excised from the federal government. Musk and Ramaswamy want to cut regulations as well as entire agencies.
“We expect mass reductions. We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated,” Ramaswamy said in a Fox News interview Sunday.
