Donald Trump has given a massive boost to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramsawany's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Among the 100 or so executive orders Trump signed was an order that terminated accommodations for remote work "as soon as practicable."
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” head of the Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk and former co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy wrote in a November op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), about 1.1 million federal employees, which is 46% of the civilian workforce, were eligible for some form of remote work while 228,000 federal workers had fully remote positions.
Commuting to work is no picnic in Washington, D.C. I did it for five years 45 years ago while working for a non-profit, and it's worse now. But working in the same building and the same floor "allows for a more collaborative work experience and team bonding opportunities," according to corporate staffing expert Aston Carter.
"If people don't come back to work, come back into the office, they're going to be dismissed," Trump commented last month.
"Professional, scientific, and technical services, information, finance and insurance, and management of companies and enterprises had over 39 percent of their workforce working remotely in 2021 compared with less than 17 percent in 2019," the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported in October. Considering that there was less than a 1% increase in productivity with telework, it's a legitimate question to ask whether the benefits of working in an office mentioned above are worth losing.
There's a problem that affects the private sector that will probably impact the order to come back to work for the federal government: managers refusing to terminate employees who are ordered back to work but don't show up.
Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University's Institute for Economic Policy Research commented in June 2022 that "More than 40 percent of managers are ignoring employees refusing to come in as many days as requested. Many of them have quietly confided to me if their employees are getting their jobs done, they are not enforcing aggressive return-to-the-office policies."
Among employed adults working from home, 46 percent "say that if their employer no longer allowed them to work from home, they would be unlikely to stay at their current job," Pew Research found in a recent survey. "This includes 26% who say they'd be very unlikely to stay." Thirty-six percent said they'd likely stay at their job if forced to return to the office, and 17 percent were noncommittal.
Women and workers younger than 50 are the most likely to pick quitting over returning to the office, at about half of each. About a third of each group said they'd stay, and smaller shares remained unsure.
This poses serious problems for employers trying to return to a traditional office culture without suffering disruption in the workplace. But it's also an opportunity for a new president and his aides who've announced plans to cut the cost of government to reduce the ranks of federal employees.
Estimates of how many remotely working federal employees would quit rather than come back to the office are all over the lot. The problem with estimations is that the number of federal employees who work from home varies widely from agency to agency. At the Department of Agriculture, 81% of workers show up in the office daily, while at the Treasury Department, less than 36% regularly work there.
With at least half of federal workers who currently work remotely saying they would rather quit than go back to the office, it's going to be a sizable number who end up making DOGE's work a lot easier.
