Forced Return In-Person Work Is The Wrong Idea for Government Reform

Coming into the office isn't always better than working from home

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Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, both self-made billionaires and of exceptional intelligence, have been put in charge by President-elect Trump of the new “Department of Government Efficiency” or “DOGE” — a tongue-in-cheek reference to Elon’s obsession with the Doge meme.

In general, I’m a fan of these two being in charge of cutting government waste, but they’ve announced an idea I just can’t get behind.

In addition to Doge, something Elon is obsessed with is the idea that workers should work in-person at their place of employment, as stated in this interview with CNBC last year:

So it should come as no surprise that in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), Musk and Ramaswamy say that

Mandating that federal employees return to the office five days a week would prompt a wave of voluntary resignations, which we would welcome. If federal workers aren’t willing to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t subsidize their Covid-era work-from-home privileges.

Questions of office vacancy and efficient utilization of government resources aside, I question the wisdom of this move. I lived in the DC metro area for over a decade. My wife commuted into Washington early in our marriage, and I spent years working inside the Beltway in Virginia.

For the job I had in Arlington, I commuted an average of 3-4 hours a day, on top of the 8-10 hour days I was spending in the office. I was gone all the time, and my commute was expensive. Hundreds of dollars a month. My kids never saw me. Gridlock also wastes time and fuel, increases accidents, and for folks like Musk who seem to care about emissions, creates a hell of a lot of smog.

If you’re working in a factory, you’ve got to show up. If you’re working in team settings, you’ve got to show up. But if your job primarily involves sitting in a cubicle all day, working at a computer and jumping on calls, I see no reason why you shouldn’t work from home. Anyone who has ever worked in an office knows how much time is wasted in chit-chat around the water cooler or walk-by visits, to say nothing of all the meetings that could have been an email. I personally get way more actual work done from home than I ever did in person.

If office vacancy rates are a problem, sell off the buildings or lease them out. That’ll save the government even more money than just creating opportunities for “natural” attrition. A lot of folks who worked in DC moved further out to more affordable areas when telework policies were implemented, and many of them did so because they have families and needed more space, and wanted to be outside the jam-packed sprawl of suburbia. Creating a situation where they have to choose a brutal multi-hour commute or a loss of employment is needlessly cutthroat. And while there are certainly many federal employees who are probably dead weight, lots of good, conscientious folks also work for the federal bureaucracy.

I’d much prefer to see government workforce reduction happen as a result of an actual efficiency analysis. Look for redundancies and waste. But trying to create an opportunity where lots of folks will quit rather than putting themselves through the gauntlet of some of the worst traffic in the country shoved through a wholly insufficient infrastructure that has been a problem for many years strikes me as incredibly shortsighted.

But maybe I’m missing something. What do you think?