President Donald Trump signed executive orders Monday imposing a hiring freeze and ending remote work for federal government employees.
“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,” the orders states. Department and agency heads will be allowed to “make exemptions they deem necessary,” the order added.
Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman on Monday evening quickly ordered all DHS employees back to work, ABC News reported.
The hiring freeze applies to all positions in the executive branch except for the military and other categories like national security, public safety and immigration enforcement, according to the order. Outside of those categories no jobs that were empty as of noon Monday can be filled, and no new positions can be created.
Trump said last month that employees who refuse to return to their offices to work full time would be fired.
Remote work has become a target of tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has called it a “privilege” of the Covid-era, when employees worked at home to help stem the spread of the disease. Musk aims to utilize a ban on remote work to cull federal workers as part of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” Musk and his former DOGE co-head Vivek Ramaswamy wrote late last year in The Wall Street Journal.
Ramaswamy is stepping down from DOGE to run for governor of Ohio. He was reportedly forced out of DOGE by Musk after Ramaswamy claimed in a social media post that American work culture “venerated mediocrity over excellence,” Politico reported. Musk, however, endorsed a social media post at the time that called American workers “re***ded,” which Musk later deleted.
Trump also signed an order that effectively reinstates Schedule F, a move that strips some civil servants of their employment protections by classifying them as political hires, presumably to help the president fill the ranks of government workers with loyalists, and fire those whom he has termed “rogue bureaucrats and career politicians.”
Trump and Musk have indicated that teleworking federal employees are inefficient and ineffective.
Only ten percent of federal employees were fully remote, and 54 percent — aboug 2.28 million workers — were required to show up for work in person, according to a report to Congress last year by the federal Office of Management and Budget.
