Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the team tagged by President-elect Donald Trump to lead efforts to slash government costs, are calling for an order for federal remote workers to return to the office, but unions are already gearing up to push back.
The National Federation of Federal Employees, representing 110,000 federal workers, has been speaking with its legal team and plans to lobby members of Congress about any office mandates or job cuts, according to the union's national president Randy Erwin, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
He added town halls with members who are concerned about new rules are being held.
"We're rallying them and getting prepared for a really, really big fight," Erwin said.
Federal union leaders say changes in any working conditions must be negotiated through collective bargaining.
In addition, union representatives report that most federal employees do not work in Washington, D.C., but across the country, and only one out of 10 of them are fully remote.
"These kinds of broadsides from Ramaswamy and Elon Musk show a really tremendous level of ignorance about the operations of the federal government," Jacqueline Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 800,000 federal and D.C. government workers, said.
She added eliminating remote or hybrid work for federal workers will make it harder to attract qualified talent into public service.
Erwin also said remote work is beneficial in the event of emergencies.
"All they want to do is cut the federal workforce and they see eliminating telework as a way to coerce people out of the federal government,” he said. "They have no idea how harmful that can be to the country."
Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece Wednesday the government will save money when people who do not want to work from an office are terminated.
"If federal employees don't want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn't pay them for the COVID-era privilege of staying home," they wrote.
Ramaswamy also last week predicted on X that up to one-quarter of civil servants will quit their jobs if they are ordered back to work in offices full time.
There are approximately 2.3 million civilian federal workers, with 30% of them being veterans.
More than half of those workers, such as healthcare workers and food-safety inspectors, do their jobs in person, according to a 2024 report from the Office of Management and Budget report.
The rest of the workers are eligible to work remotely some of the time and perform about 61% of their hours in the workplace. According to U.S. Census Bureau surveys, federal and private-sector employees are working roughly the same amount of time remotely versus in person.
The OMB report shows staffers at the State Department who are eligible to work remotely are already spending about 80% of their work hours on-site. The averages are lower at the Defense Department, where workers are on-site about 64% of the time, and at the Departments of Education, Treasury, and Housing and Urban Development, where workers are on site between 36% and 39% of the time.
Meanwhile, Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency is an advisory group. Musk and Ramaswamy have been appointed to lead it, but the group does not have the direct power to issue mandates, including on remote workers.
Both Ramaswamy and Musk are close to Trump, helping their words carry sway.