President-elect Donald Trump announced on Monday that he intends to fire any federal employees who do not physically return to their offices when his new administration takes office, and he has promised to challenge a Biden-era agreement allowing for remote work in court.
“If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be fired,” Trump said at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home.
“Somebody in the Biden administration gave a five-year waiver of that, so for five years people don’t have to come back into the office,” he informed me. “This is ludicrous. It was like a gift to a union, and we’ll definitely go to court to halt it.”
The Social Security Administration and more than 40,000 workers represented by the American Federation of Government Employees union struck an agreement earlier this month that will enable the majority of those employees to continue working remotely two to five days per week.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s endeavor to save government costs, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, is expected to suggest the elimination of remote labor throughout the United States government. Musk has long criticized working from home, calling it “morally wrong.”
According to the Office of Management and Budget, around half of the country’s 2.3 million federal workers work entirely in-person, with the other half eligible for remote work. Approximately 10% are entirely remote.
