Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—two billionaire entrepreneurs and new Trump administration advisors—are making bold promises. Namely: This week, the duo told Congress that through their advisory board, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), they’ll reduce “government waste” by $2 trillion.
The catch: Those savings will come through nixing federal employees’ ability to work remotely.
A particularly vocal advocate of DOGE is Joni Ernst, the Republican senator from Iowa, whose office released a 60-page report decrying the prevalence of remote work in government jobs.
“Growing up on a farm, I know what working from home really means. But in Washington,
working from home apparently means having a field day,” Ernst wrote. “If bureaucrats want to be out of the office so badly, we can make that wish come true by putting them out to pasture for good.”
Ernst, who chairs the Senate DOGE caucus, claimed in the report that just 6% of federal workers actually work in-person full-time. That 94% segment is who Musk and Ramaswamy are zeroing in on.
“If you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%! Almost no one,” Musk wrote on X, linking to a New York Post write-up of Ernst’s report.
“Literally thousands of empty buildings, not just in America, but around the world, paid for with your tax dollars!” Musk wrote in a follow-up X post.
Per The Daily Mail, Ernst is sponsoring a DOGE-related bill, titled the REMOTE Act, which will permit “software to monitor bureaucrats' computer use and require agency reports on the adverse impacts of telework.”
The software proposed in the bill will be, at its core, a tracking device. Per the Mail, it would “periodically review the network traffic generated by each such teleworking employee,” tally up the “average number of logins” each employee makes, count how long they spend online, and also collect any generated network traffic.
Tracking history
The tracking is hardly a new phenomenon, particularly among CEOs anxious about losing control of their remote-first workforce. In 2022, the New York Times reported that J.P. Morgan, Barclays Bank, and UnitedHealth Group all track employees, monitoring how long it takes them to write an email and each individual keystroke.
Musk, in particular, has made no secret of his distaste for remote work—or flexible work of any kind—in his capacity as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, as well as owner of X, formerly Twitter.
In 2022, Musk told Tesla employees in a company email he expected them to report into the office 40 hours per week or “we will assume you have resigned.” And one of his first moves after purchasing X in October 2022 was to threaten layoffs for any workers who refused to come into the office, claiming remote workers were just “pretending” to work and insisting that any workers desiring flexible options run their requests by him personally.
On Thursday, Musk and Ramaswamy attended “several closed-door meetings,” ABC News reported, with a smattering of Republican congresspeople and senators in an attempt to garner support for their plan.
The RTO Defenders
The businessmen, who President-elect Donald Trump selected to lead an external advisory board called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), attended several closed-door meetings with GOP senators and House members to sell their plans to cut as much as $2 trillion from the federal budget of what they called waste.
In a November op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy wrote that “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy” will be the main way of cutting trillions in costs.
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” they wrote. “If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the COVID-era privilege of staying home.”
Ramaswamy even suggested firing 75% of federal employees.
The federal employees who currently are taking advantage of their work-from-home abilities are part of the problem of federal budget waste, Musk told lawmakers on Thursday.
Many of those lawmakers agree with him.
Musk’s long war against remote work may reach a detente
Echoing his earlier gripes, Musk said in 2023 that working from home is as much a productivity issue as it is a moral issue, arguing desk workers shouldn’t be able to enjoy the flexibility of a home office if industrial workers—like those assembling Tesla cars—and food-delivery workers have to leave their homes to make a living. “People should get off their goddamn moral high horse with their work from home bulls–t,” he said. “The laptop class is living in la la land.”
But the issue might be overblown. Per a nearly 3,000-page August 2024 report from the Federal Office of Management and Budget, roughly half of federal workers are in fully in-person roles, like healthcare and food-supply inspection. Even for telework-eligible roles, 60% of work performed was at an assigned job site.
“These figures demonstrate that the Federal workforce is generally in line with the rates of on-site work performed across all sectors in the economy, as demonstrated by independent analysis from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” the OMB said.
Nonetheless, House Speaker Mike Johnson voiced support for Musk’s opinion on the matter, expressed excitement to continue working with Musk and Ramaswamy, and repeated an unsubstantiated claim that just 1% of federal workers work in-person each day.
Yet Musk and Ramaswamy, for all their promises, might find themselves without much power. Musk in particular, who stormed into Twitter and instantly fired thousands of workers after his $44 billion takeover, will lack the same abilities in the government.
DOGE “doesn’t have any power,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office and current president of the center-right American Action Forum, told Fortune’s Geoff Colvin. “They’re an outside advisory group who are going to generate ideas. They are essentially a very high-profile think tank.”
