US president Donald Trump has ordered federal workers to return to the office five days a week and weakened job protections for civil servants, the first salvoes in his campaign to gut the federal bureaucracy.
The one-two punch would force large numbers of white-collar government employees to forfeit remote working arrangements, reversing a trend that took off in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.
If upheld by the courts, the measures could also strip mid-level officials of the legal guarantees that generally keep them insulated from ideological purges.
Mr Trump’s allies have said the return-to-work mandate and the stripping of civil service protections – widely known as “Schedule F” – is intended to help the president replace long-serving government workers with loyalists faithful only to his agenda.
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In a brief statement posted to the White House website, Mr Trump ordered all heads of departments and agencies to “take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary”.
A second statement said that any power government officials have “is delegated by the president, and they must be accountable to the president.”
It largely reinstates a late 2020 administrative order from Mr Trump’s first term that Joe Biden rescinded when he took power and is almost certain to draw swift pushback and litigation.
The US National Treasury Employee Union, a labour union that represents federal government employees in dozens of agencies, sued Mr Trump in a federal court in Washington on Monday, aiming to block the “Schedule F” executive order.
The two orders are being paired with a hiring freeze and the creation of an advisory body – dubbed the department of government efficiency (Doge) – which is meant to help Mr Trump take huge chunks out of the federal government and eliminate some agencies wholesale.
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Experts say the aggregate effect of the changes will be to drive frustrated government employees out of their jobs, a goal the Trump team is explicitly gunning for.
Tesla chief Elon Musk – who chairs Doge – recently predicted that revoking “the Covid-era privilege” of telework would trigger “a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome”.
Not all government workers would be covered by the return-to-office mandate. A quarter of the federal workforce is unionised and many are covered by bargaining agreements that allow for remote work or hybrid arrangements.
However, Russell Vought, Mr Trump’s nominee for office of management and budget (OMB), has hinted at efforts to unwind those deals, telling lawmakers that the agreements struck during the Biden administration were “a concerning phenomenon, and one that we are looking at very closely”.
Republicans have spent decades lampooning federal employees as lazy bureaucrats; the president’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement has ratcheted the criticism to the next level, with the president calling federal employees “crooked” and “dishonest”.
There was sustained cheering when Mr Trump signed the executive order to get workers to return to offices. He held the document aloft with a wry smile as the applause rang out around the arena.
“The politics play well with the Maga crowd, because work-from-home workers tend to be higher educated,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University who studies labour and management issues.
While Mr Trump and other Republicans have suggested that remote work is rampant among federal employees, government data shows that it is more limited. About 46 per cent of federal workers, or 1.1 million people, are eligible for remote work, and about 228,000 of them are fully remote, according to a report issued by the White House OMB in August.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a federal employee union, said hybrid working arrangements were a “key tool” for attracting America’s best employees.
“Restricting the use of hybrid work arrangements will make it harder for federal agencies to compete for top talent,” it said in an email.
Mr Bloom said that the Trump administration’s efforts to coerce the federal workforce would likely spark lots of fights, dismissals and resignations – ultimately leading to a lower quality of government service for Americans across the board and potential failures of core safety and social security functions.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of problems with government services falling apart,” Mr Bloom said. “God help anyone who’s interacting with the federal government.” – Reuters
