It’s time to get back to the office if you’re a federal employee. On Thursday, we learned that President Trump has signed an executive order ending the Biden administration’s work-from-home, COVID-era policy and ordering federal workers back to their actual place of employment. This is reportedly in response to one of the first recommendations from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE.)
What a novel idea.
As promised on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring federal employees to return to in-person work.
The order comes after Trump indicated that he planned to push back on former President Joe Biden’s move allowing federal workers to remain in a hybrid work arrangement through 2029.
“Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary,” the order reads.
Agencies must begin the move to fully in-person work by 5 p.m. on Friday, the order stated.
That doesn’t leave a lot of time, but the order does appear to say that agencies must “begin the move.” It’s unclear what “begin the move” means, but we can presume that President Trump’s administration won’t let it drag on into months or years. And, like so much this new administration has done in the last three days, it’s a good start.
Elon Musk leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and is tasked with finding ways to cut government spending and improve the efficiency of federal initiatives.
One of those initiatives was ending remote work and viewing the requirement that federal workers return to the office as a way of spurring voluntary layoffs.
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the COVID-era privilege of staying home,” Musk wrote in an op-ed published with Vivek Ramaswamy, former DOGE co-leader, in The Wall Street Journal last month.
Voluntary terminations aren’t necessarily a bad thing. There is a compelling need to cut back the number of federal employees, and if some of that can be accomplished through attrition, so much the better.
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There is also the security issue that hasn’t been mentioned in this piece – cybersecurity. Many federal employees are issued laptops, presumably secure laptops, which under normal circumstances would be used in a secure setting. Allowing employees who work with secure data, which could range anywhere from State Department to Defense to Treasury employees, to work from home when there is no compelling reason to do so seems a security risk.
This was a COVID-era measure put in place by the Biden administration. It’s time it was wrapped up. We’re not paying these people to sit at home. Let them get their butts back in to the office.
