Writing an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who were jointly asked by President-elect Donald Trump to head up the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), opined on a topic that is still a source of friction in offices throughout the country: returning to office, according to Fast Company. 

According to the op-ed, the newly formed entity's main objective is "to cut the federal government down to size." 

In their op-ed, both leaders offered their thoughts on how DOGE will attempt to cut costs and limit the federal government's size. They gave hints about their plans to reduce staff throughout the civil service partly by mandating that federal workers return to the office full-time. “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,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote. 

Fast Company cited an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) report earlier in 2024 that demonstrated federal employees eligible for telework were already spending over 60% of their time working from the office. However, the policy shift that Musk and Ramaswamy are talking about can affect over a million workers, roughly half the overall federal workforce, who are now able to work from home at least some of the time. 

DOGE's plans align with Musk’s approach in leading his own companies. When he bought X, formerly Twitter, he stopped remote work and instituted extensive layoffs, cutting approximately 80% of the workforce. In 2022, he told employees at Tesla and SpaceX they had to be at work a minimum of 40 hours in the office every week. Musk has even characterized remote work as “morally wrong” given that some employees do not have the work-from-home option, Fast Company reported.  

Fast Company reported that, in characterizing hybrid work as a “COVID-era privilege,” Musk and Ramaswamy said what many leaders have indicated as they mandate uncompromising return-to-office policies. Even as they saw high productivity rates during COVID and the following years, many firms have insisted that five days a week in the office is necessary to teach collaboration, despite resistance from workers who became used to hybrid schedules or were hired as remote employees. When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees they should return to the office full time, he noted that before COVID "it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward.”  

Some return-to-office requirements were seemingly established to boost attrition and encourage voluntary resignations—and C-suite executives have said that they anticipated turnover after those changes were implemented, according to Fast Company. Responding to employee pushback regarding Amazon’s new policy, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman suggested that those who were not pleased with the new arrangement should resign. According to a Reuters report, he noted, “If there are people who just don’t work well in that environment and don’t want to, that’s okay, there are other companies around."  

However, few leaders have been as forthcoming as Musk and Ramaswamy about the motive behind their return-to-work requirements, and more notably, expressly saying that the new policy will help downsize the government's manpower. The idea that more stringent in-office requirements will result in some federal workers quitting, similar to their private sector equivalents, seems to be at the crux of their downsizing proposals. This policy is likely effective if corporate mandates are any yardstick of how people view remote work.