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The DOGE head has no chance of cutting spending massively if WFH remains the federal bureaucratic norm
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Elon Musk has not yet started walking through the lobbies of federal government offices carrying a kitchen sink. Nor has he started demanding that only the “hardcore” staffers bother coming to work in the morning. Even so, he has fired the first shot in what promises to be a bitter fight with the one million people on the federal payroll eligible for some form of remote work with his demand that they all get back to the office. And while the backlash will be ferocious, at some point he has to take on the public sector unions – and this will be a fight he has to win.
With his hyper-energetic style of management, it is no surprise that Musk has already started work even before the soon-to-be-created Department of Government Efficiency has been officially established. In a column in the Wall Street Journal this week, along with his partner in cost-cutting Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk demanded that lounging around all day in your PJs, officially known as working from home, had to come to an end immediately.
“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,” they wrote.
With a million federal employees entitled to work from home part of the time, and a quarter of a million in fully remote positions with no expectation of ever showing up in person, the backlash has already been furious. The unions are up in arms, and Musk’s political opponents are attacking his decision. Even so, he was completely right to pick this fight.
First, it will automatically improve productivity. The overblown claims of its evangelists that working from our kitchen tables would improve well-being and mental health so much that we would all produce much more have now been completely discredited. We tried a mass experiment during the pandemic, and the results were clear. People go to the gym, walk the dog, or catch up on daytime TV instead of working, and output goes down. At a stroke, bringing them all back to the office would generate better results.
Next, it will get rid of the slackers. It is hard to know how anyone in their right mind can think that it is a good idea to tell Musk they will quit in a huff if they have to get on a commuter train. They are only going to get one answer, and it will consist of two words that probably can’t be printed here. As he spelt out in his op-ed, Musk knows that the only people who will quit are those who can’t be bothered to work hard in the first place, and he doesn’t want them on the payroll anyway. As any boss will tell you, if you can persuade the people you don’t want to keep on staff to leave, it is a lot easier than firing them.
Finally, it will end a blatantly unfair privilege. Almost the entire private sector has now ended the WFH experiment. With customers to serve, they can’t afford to allow productivity to collapse. Why should federal employees be allowed a perk that the rest of the country, which pays the taxes to support them all, doesn’t enjoy? It is clearly unfair, and it is time it was brought to an end.
Musk needs to pick a big early battle with the federal unions, and he needs to make it one that he can win. If he can’t slash the federal workforce, and get people working more efficiently, there is no way he will get anywhere close to the $2 trillion he wants to cut from government spending.
It is going to be a tough fight. But if he can win this one, Musk will have taken a crucial first step towards transforming the government – and he can move on to bigger, and even harder, targets.
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