WASHINGTON — Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk’s new effort to improve government efficiency could target the roughly two-thirds of federal workers who are still allowed to work from home 18 months after the pandemic ended.
Vacant federal office space in downtown Washington is expensive to maintain and a source of deep frustration for Mayor Muriel Bowser. He told reporters last week that he had requested a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump and that the top item on his agenda was getting federal workers back to downtown Washington.
“How we can make sure our federal workforce gets back to work is a big thing,” said Bowser, who said he wants a partnership with the federal government to “bring vitality back to our city.”
According to the Office of Management and Budget, federal employees who are eligible to telecommute are in the office 60% of the time, and about 10% of all employees are completely remote. All told, the US has approx 2.2 million federal employees.
After Trump’s election victory Ramaswamy said Tucker Carlson said he wants to take a “hammer and chainsaw” to the federal government by forcing public servants to go back to work.
“They don’t go to work,” he said. “There is no need to talk about the fact that you are in a mass shooting, a mass exodus. Just tell them to come back between 8pm and 6pm five days a week.”
Ramaswamy predicted that this would lead to “a 25% thinning of the federal bureaucracy there”.
Jacqueline Simon, policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing more than 700,000 workers, said more than half of federal jobs are not suitable for working from home.
He also argued that Ramaswamy and Musk’s claims were exaggerated.
He told NBC News: “That includes all the medical staff at VA hospitals, clinics and the Bureau of Prisons. Border Patrol agents and federal air marshals, people who inspect slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.”
With fewer people in the office, the cost of excess federal office space became a concern. Last year, the Government Accountability Office concluded that 17 of the 24 largest federal agencies used an average of only 25% of their office space.
For the Department of Education, which Musk and Ramaswamy topped the list for elimination, the usage rate was even lower, at 16%.
According to OMB, as of August, 98% of Education Department employees are eligible to work from home, and more than half work remotely. One of the agencies with the lowest office utilization rate, at just 9%, was the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency.
Allowing some employees to work partially from home helps the federal government recruit and retain a talented workforce that has to compete with the private sector despite lower wages, Simon said.
In August 2023, President Joe Biden required all federal employees to spend at least half of each biweekly pay period in the office to get public servants back in the office.
Ironically, the federal government encouraged working from home long before the coronavirus pandemic. After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush saw it as a way to ensure employees could stay online and work during emergencies.
In 2004, just over 750,000 federal employees were eligible to work from home. Since then, that number has nearly doubled to 1.3 million.