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 pledged to challenge a Biden-era agreement allowing for remote work in court.
“If people do not come back to work, come back into the office, they are going to be dismissed,” Trump said during a press 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 do not have to come back into the office,” he informed me. “This is ridiculous. It was like a gift to a union, and we will obviously go to court to stop it.”
The Social Security Administration and more than 40,000 workers represented by the American Federation of Government Employees union reached an agreement earlier this month that will allow the majority of those employees to continue working remotely two to five days per week.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s initiative to cut government spending, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, is likely to recommend the elimination of remote work across the United States government. Musk has long criticized working from home, describing it as “morally wrong.”
According to the Office of Management and Budget, roughly half of the country’s 2.3 million federal employees work entirely in-person, with the remaining half eligible for remote work. Approximately 10% are fully remote.