- President Trump partially justified the buyout for federal workers as a push for productivity, saying those who work from home are, in reality, slipping off to enjoy sporting endeavors.
President Donald Trump has delivered a harsh blow in the battle for flexible work, saying federal workers who log on from home are only working 10% of the time and are likely to have two jobs.
When signing a host of executive orders on Monday the commander-in-chief was asked for his response to a Boston judge blocking Elon Musk's plan to use buyouts to incentivize federal workers to leave the government's ranks.
The president said he didn't know how the plan could be declared illegal, saying, "I got elected on making government better, more efficient and smaller. That's what we're doing."
He added the buyout offered is "generous" with more than 60,000 former staffers now signing up to quit.
On top of the buyouts, another tactic to push staff to quit—advertised by DOGE boss Elon Musk and his former partner Vivek Ramaswamy—was to require them to come back to the office full-time.
President Trump doubled down on this stance yesterday, saying, "I happen to be a believer that you have to go to work. I don't think you can work from home.
"Nobody's going to work from home, they're going to be going out, they're gonna play tennis, they're gonna play golf. They're gonna do a lot of things—they're not working."
He added, "It's a rare person that's going to work. You might work 10% of the time, maybe 20%, I don't think you're going to work a lot more than that."
President Trump also believes some federal workers are balancing two jobs.
"I think they…have an obligation not to have a second job when they're supposed to be working for the federal government," he added. "You're going to find that a lot of these people have second jobs—they'll be collecting a federal government check and they'll be working two jobs. That's big trouble for them."
President Trump's RTO mandate presents more of a problem to some departments than others.
For example, according to an August 2024 report compiled by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 2,341 of the Department of Education’s 4,245 staff work remotely—that’s more than 55%.
Moreover, in the General Services Administration, 49.8% of the nearly 13,000 staff work offsite.
What are Trump's WFH habits?
Time and again, it has been argued that flexible working has greatly helped mothers stay in the workforce.
Research from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution conducted in 2023 found approximately a quarter of women with children—regardless of the age of their youngest child—reported working from home in the first half of 2023.
This was significantly higher for women with at least one child under the age of 5.
Such working moms may question when they could fit in a quick round of golf among their parenting and professional duties, but President Trump himself finds the time.
In 2021, the Washington Post analyzed how often the Republican politician was on the course—having said he wouldn't have time at the start of his term.
Yet two weeks into his term at the Oval Office, the WaPo found, Trump was back on the green and returned for two consecutive weekends.
The analysis adds that, overall, President Trump likely played around 261 rounds during his first administration—approximately once every 5.6 days—but this could be higher given that his staff didn't declare the activity, as the Obama administration had previously done.
It seems President Trump's second term is kicking off in much the same way, after the Oval Office occupant enjoyed a round with sporting legend Tiger Woods on Sunday morning, before jetting to the Super Bowl.
It was his second trip to Mar-a-Lago, his private golf club, since he was sworn in on Jan. 20.
Marc Andreessen, of Silicon Valley veterans Andreessen Horowitz, previously said he had spent half his time at the Florida resort since Trump's win.
“He will happily talk to distinguished visitors about like who the vice president should be, and then he’ll ask the caddy," Andreessen told the Honestly With Bari Weiss podcast—indicating he's joined Trump on the course.
He added, "It’s been painted in a negative way, but there’s a real strength to it, which is like he really talks to regular people a lot, he’s in that mode all the time talking to everybody.”
