Musk and Ramaswamy, “jackhammer and electric saw” against smartworking in the USA

“We won’t even have to talk about mass layoffs, we will just tell them that they have to return to the office five days a week from 8am to 6pm.” As Vivek Ramaswamy, the other tech billionaire who together with Elon Musk will lead the department for government efficiency, the Dogesaid that it will force federal employees who currently “don’t go to work” but continue, 18 months after the end of the pandemic, to use smartworking to varying degrees to return to work in person.

Interviewed by far-right host and Trump loyalist Tucker Carlson, the biotech entrepreneur confirmed that his and Musk’s task will be to use “the jackhammer and the electric saw” to revolutionize, and drastically cut, the federal apparatus. And he says he is convinced that by removing the possibility of working remotely “the federal bureaucracy will be reduced by 25%.

At the moment – Nbcnews recalls – there are 1.3 million federal employees, out of a total of 2.2 million, who can work smartworking, 10% of them totally remotely, while the remainder, from August 2023, must go to the office at least half the days of two working weeks. Musk’s intolerance for remote working, which he branded as “morally wrong”, is well known: in June 2022, in the midst of the pandemic, he forced Tesla employees to work in person for at least 40 hours a week. And he did the same thing immediately after taking control of Twitter, now X, in October of the same year.

The However, the two billionaires’ crusade against remote working for federal employees could find an unexpected allythe Democratic mayor of Washington DC who has long been asking for help to bring “life back to the center of our city” where most of the buildings that house federal departments have been emptied for years now. “How we get our federal workers back into the offices is a big question,” said the mayor who has already asked for a meeting with Donald Trump to work together towards this goal.

According to the Government Accountability Office, Last year, 17 of the 24 major federal agencies used just 25 percent of their space. And there are correspondences between the lists of these buildings and the one on which Musk and Ramaswamy intend to bring down their axe, starting with the Department of Education which uses only 16% of its spaces, with 98% of the employees who can work from home and over half who actually do it.

From the Federal Employees UnionAmerican Federation of government employees, which has over 700 thousand members, the statements of the future Doge leaders are dismissed as exaggeratedremembering that over half of federal jobs – in health, security, border protection and food safety – do not involve smartworking. And remember that by allowing you to work partially from home, the federal government can recruit and retain working talent despite significantly lower wages in the private sector.