Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk’s new effort to increase government efficiency could initially target the nearly two-thirds of federal workers who are still approved to work from home 18 months after the pandemic ended.
Vacant federal office space in downtown Washington is costly to maintain and a deep source of frustration to Mayor Muriel Bowser. She told reporters last week that she had requested a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump and that top on her agenda is pushing federal workers to return to downtown Washington.
“How we can make sure that our federal workforce is back to work is one big thing,” Bowser said, adding that she wants a partnership with the federal government to bring “vibrancy back to our town.”
According to the Office of Management and Budget, telework-eligible federal workers are in the office 60% of the time and about 10% of all workers are fully remote. All told, the U.S. has roughly 2.2 million federal workers.
After Trump’s election victory, Ramaswamy told Tucker Carlson that he wanted to take a “jackhammer and a chain saw” to the federal government, starting by forcing civil servants to return to work.
“They don’t go to work,” he said. “You don’t even have to talk about you’re in a mass firing, a mass exodus. Just tell them they have to come back five days a week from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.”
Ramaswamy predicted that would lead to a “25% thinning out of the federal bureaucracy right there.”
Read more at AOL.com
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