With Elon Musk at the head of DOGE, United States officials can say goodbye to something: teleworking

Elon Musk was one of the most belligerent voices against teleworking, even in those dark days of confinement in which many of the companies that now return to the office promised teleworking forever.

The new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) of the White House that Elon Musk will lead has already shown that it will follow the guidelines that the technology magnate has previously applied in his companies: reduce the number of officials to a minimum and eliminate teleworking.

Return to the office for officials. As Elon Musk himself revealed in an opinion article for The Wall Street Journalone of the first items on DOGE’s agenda is the reduction of government personnel, especially those with remote or hybrid work models.

“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would lead to a wave of voluntary layoffs that we welcome: if federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay them for the privilege of staying home in the Covid era,” Musk said in his writing.

Two million officials under the microscope. According to a report from the US Congress, the Administration is responsible for some 2.28 million officials, in addition to military and postal personnel who are not included in this count. 1.2 million of these officials work from a government office (54%), while 1.1 million functions are susceptible to working remotely. Around 228,000 civil servants (10%) work remotely daily.

According to the article published by Musk, the intention is to “massively reduce the number of officials throughout the federal bureaucracy” and one of the alternative paths is to force the resignations of officials who do not want or cannot return to government offices. A strategy that some HR managers from large companies have admitted to having used to reduce their workforce.

They are encouraged to move into the private sector. The person responsible for applying personnel cuts and regulations has assured that those officials who are dismissed for having eliminated their functions will receive fair compensation.

“Employees whose positions are eliminated deserve to be treated with respect, and DOGE’s goal is to help support their transition to the private sector. The president can use existing laws to give them incentives to retire early and to make voluntary severance payments for facilitate a graceful exit,” Musk wrote in his opinion piece.

Business Tactics for Government. President-elect Donald Trump made clear in his letter appointing Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk as directors of DOGE that his intention was to adopt a “business model” for the country’s governance. Along these lines, Elon Musk has focused his strategy of reducing the Administration on his business experiences, when after purchasing Twitter he fired 80% of his staff, when he fired the entire Tesla supercharger department or when he optimized the manufacturing and launch of its satellites for Starlink.

With the public announcement of the return to the offices for civil servants as a tool to get rid of part of the workforce at zero cost, Elon Musk exposes the managers of companies like Amazon, who have tried to distance themselves from accusations of covert dismissal after your back-to-office policy.

Fire officials. Officially, US law does not allow federal officials to be directly fired in order to protect them from political retaliation for their actions. However, as Elon Musk argues in his writing, the statute does allow the executive to apply “personnel reductions” that are not directed at specific officials.

Since the goal of DOGE would be to reduce the number of regulations and state agencies, the position of these officials would cease to exist and the government would have the green light to dispense with them.

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Imagen | Flickr (TED Conference)