Musk, Ramaswamy Push for Federal Workers to Return to Office Full Time

Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy are taking a page out of Amazon’s playbook and pushing for federal workers to return to the office five days per week, as part of their appointed task force to review government spending under President-elect Donald Trump.

As Trump’s chosen leaders of the anticipated Department of Government Efficiency — which will operate outside of the government — Musk and Ramaswamy said they will eliminate remote work for government employees, even if it means some staff quitting.

“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 for the COVID-era privilege of staying home,” they wrote in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

If their plan is approved, the return-to-office mandate would apply to more than 2 million federal workers across the country — 80 percent of whom work outside of Washington, D.C., Bloomberg reported.

The announcement comes after D.C. officials have long pushed outgoing President Joe Biden to bring workers back into the office due to high office vacancy rates and stagnant economic activity in the nation’s capital, according to Bloomberg.

By the end of 2023, regional office vacancy in the D.C. metro area increased 100 basis points year-over-year and reached 21.8 percent during the fourth quarter, as Commercial Observer previously reported.

While Musk and Ramaswamy’s announcement would likely reduce the city’s office vacancy rate, there could be significant backlash from labor unions on the return-to-office mandate, as many federal employees are unionized, Bloomberg reported.

This isn’t Musk’s first push to get rid of working from home. Shortly after acquiring social media platform X, formerly Twitter, Musk announced in November 2022 that all staffers at the company would be expected to work in the office at least 40 hours per week. He also made a similar edict to Tesla employees.

Several other tech giants have since followed suit, including Amazon (AMZN), which said in September that office workers must return to their desks five days per week starting in 2025, and Salesforce, whose employees must work in the office at least four days per week as of October.

Isabelle Durso can be reached at idurso@commercialobserver.com.