US President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to cut the bloated government bureaucracy that he sees as inefficient, and has appointed two billionaires to head the Office of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to do the job.

Billionaire Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, the two leaders of DOGE, have announced that the first targets they are targeting in their effort to streamline the government apparatus are officials who are working remotely.

“If employees don’t want to go to work in person, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them to continue using the privilege of working remotely like during Covid-19,” the two billionaires emphasized in an article published in the WSJ on November 20.

Ending remote work for officials is seen as one of the first decisions Mr. Trump will announce after taking office on January 20, 2025, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Musk believes that requiring US officials to return to a five-day work week at work would create a “tsunami” that would prompt a series of federal employees to voluntarily resign, helping the US government streamline its apparatus without having to make mass layoffs.

Telework has been widely adopted in the United States since the Covid-19 pandemic began and continues to be so far. Of the 2.3 million federal employees in the United States, about 1.3 million are approved to work remotely. The rest need to work in person because of the nature of their jobs, such as food safety inspectors or health care workers, according to a 2024 report by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

US government data shows that employees who are allowed to work remotely still spend 60% of their time at work, on par with private sector workers.

In an interview with the WSJ last week, Ramaswamy suggested that US officials should worry about their jobs once DOGE goes live. “We’re going to proceed as rationally as possible on an individual level. But in order to streamline the bureaucracy, the plan will obviously have some consequences,” he said.

Mr. Ramaswamy in a post on X estimated that about 25% of officials in the US government apparatus would resign if DOGE applied the regulation of full-time direct work.

While some companies like Amazon and Dell have recently asked employees to return to the office full-time, most U.S. companies have the flexibility to allow employees to work remotely, according to Flex Index, which tracks more than 6,300 companies.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s business empire is seen as an exception, as he completely eliminated remote work at Tesla, Spacex and X after the pandemic, describing this way of working as “morally wrong”.

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser supports the idea of requiring full-time public employees to report to work. She has urged President Joe Biden to issue a clear directive requiring full-time in-person work for federal employees. She said last week that she had offered to meet with President-elect Trump to discuss the issue.

“Ensuring the federal workforce gets back to work is critical,” Bowser said.

But requiring in-person work five days a week would cause disruption at some federal agencies, observers say. Some officials who are allowed to work remotely say Musk’s idea would disrupt their lives and is unlikely to save the government the money it hopes it will.

“I can’t give up my job. I’ll have to go back to Washington, D.C., even if it means being away from my family,” said a Library of Congress employee living in the Midwest.

An official who has worked in the US government for more than 10 years said it would take 2-3 hours a day to travel to the nearest office if he had to return to work full-time.

“The stress will be overwhelming. I will resign and quit my job if I have to go to work full-time. I will take this as a sign to start a new chapter in my life,” the person said.

Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, disagreed with DOGE’s idea, arguing that maintaining remote work is also a way to be prepared in the event of a disaster. He noted that one of the biggest efforts to promote remote work for federal employees was after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“All they want to do is cut the federal workforce and see ending telework as a way to force people to voluntarily leave their jobs. They have no idea how bad that could be for the country,” Erwin said.

Ending remote work isn’t the only thing DOGE is planning to do in the near future. Sources familiar with the matter said the committee is expected to implement a number of executive orders aimed at cutting government spending.

Billionaire Musk said at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in October that he could help cut at least $2 trillion from the US federal budget.

The source added that Musk and Ramaswamy are identifying all the places they can cut across the federal government, while businessman Ramaswamy will be in charge of making legal arguments for the proposed cuts.

DOGE is said to “provide advice and guidance from outside the government” on efforts to streamline the system, cut regulations, reduce spending, and restructure federal agencies. Mr. Trump expects this mission to be completed by July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the US Independence Day.

Despite the pushback from some federal officials, the creation of a Government Performance Board is a welcome and necessary idea, said Joel Thayer, president of the Digital Progress Institute and a Washington-based attorney.

“A more efficient government has long been a bipartisan priority. DOGE is one of the most aggressive plans to speed up the wheels of government,” Thayer said.

Thuy Lam (According to CNN, WSJ, Newsweek )