President-elect Donald Trump is calling on the Biden administration to keep its promise of an orderly and peaceful transition of power by undoing its move to protect workers who refuse to return to the office under new Trump administration policy.
"We're talking about a friendly takeover, a friendly transition as they like to say — this is a friendly transition — and it is, but there are two events that took place that I think are very terrible," Trump said Monday at a Mar-a-Lago news conference.
Trump called out the Biden administration putting a five-year block on the Trump administration from firing remote federal workers who refuse to return to the office and its selling of border wall construction materials in the finals days of the lame-duck administration at cut-rate prices.
"One is that if people don't come back to work, come back into the office, they're going to be dismissed, and somebody in the Biden administration gave a five-year waiver of that," Trump lamented.
"So that for five years people don't have to come back into the office. It involved 49,000 people. For five years they don't have to go?
"They just signed this thing; it's ridiculous. It was a like a gift to a union. And we're going to obviously be in court to stop it."
Trump called out President Joe Biden's "really terrible" effort to sell unused border construction materials for "5 cents on the dollar."
"It's almost a criminal act," Trump said.
Department of Government Efficiency advisers Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are seeking to cut waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government and have billed the requirement of federal workers returning to offices as a way to get a lot of federal workers on the dole to just resign because they don't want to have to go back to the office.
Senate DOGE caucus member Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said federal workers need "to climb out of the bubble bath, put away the golf clubs, and get back to work," pledging to help the agency put the "bloated" bureaucracy "on a permanent diet," The Hill reported.