President-elect Donald Trump announced on Monday that he plans to fire federal employees who continue to telework instead of working in person at government agencies. “If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed,” Trump said during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump and his advisers have expressed their intention to reduce the federal workforce by eliminating remote work options, hoping this will prompt employees to quit. However, firing federal employees for working from home could prove challenging, as many federal union contracts allow for remote or hybrid work schedules.
Trump criticized such agreements, including a new contract between the Social Security Administration and the union representing over 40,000 employees, which extends telework scheduling through 2029. “It was like a gift to a union, and we’re going to obviously be in court to stop it,” Trump said.
In response, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) dismissed rumors of widespread federal telework as “simply untrue.” Union president Everett Kelley emphasized that more than half of federal employees cannot telework due to the nature of their jobs, only 10% of federal workers are remote, and those with hybrid arrangements spend over 60% of their working hours in the office.
Many federal agencies, like other workplaces, adopted remote work during the pandemic and have not fully returned to in-office schedules. As a result, unions have been working to secure hybrid work arrangements in collective bargaining agreements.
Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” an advisory body led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, has already recommended eliminating remote work, with the goal of encouraging federal workers to resign. “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in a recent op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.
These efforts may lead to legal challenges, particularly if the Trump administration attempts to override existing union contracts. Kelley noted that such agreements are “binding and enforceable under the law” and warned that the union would be prepared to enforce their rights if the administration fails to honor these contracts.
