Remote work makes a ton of sense. In fact, most folks would do better coming in 2-3 days per week. However, firing a government employee or downsizing is next to impossible.
Better to force folks to come into work and thin the herd...then bring back remote work later.
Don’t Let DOGE Kill Remote Work
Hybrid work isn’t only family-friendly, it’s more efficient too.
By Dana Mack, WSJ
Dec. 23, 2024 4:58 pm ET
The Department of Government Efficiency is targeting remote-work arrangements. This would be unfriendly to families and bad for government efficiency. Most remote-work plans have little effect on productivity and save parents many thousands of dollars a year in commuting expenses and child care. More important, they grant parents hundreds of hours of extra precious family time every year.
The Senate DOGE Caucus’s leader, Joni Ernst (R., Iowa), recently released a report on the alleged evils of telework. She broadly accuses federal workers of “phoning it in.” The report claims that 90% of federal employees “eligible” to telework are availing themselves of it, that only 6% show up at the office full-time, and that the government owns 9,962 vacant or partially vacant properties. Employees, the report says, spend working hours on the “golf course” and “in bubble baths.”
Ms. Ernst’s report doesn’t square the Office of Management and Budget’s calculation that 80% of federal employees’ work hours were in the office. And her report ignores a key question: How do at-home abuses of the system stack up against sins formerly committed in the office?
Lest we forget, before Covid initiated the trend to remote work, the federal government’s many services hardly chimed with its clocks. It could take hours to get an Internal Revenue Service employee on the phone and months to get Medicare to answer written queries. Recall, too, the Veterans Affairs hospital scandal of low morale and deficient medical care.
Ms. Ernst apparently believes in a fantasy past when in-office work guaranteed efficiency. That isn’t the case. Nor is her suggestion that remote work fosters laziness. A Stanford study found that remote workers in the private sector were slightly less productive than their in-office counterparts only when working fully remote. When working on a hybrid schedule, these employees were as productive as their in-office counterparts, and sometimes more so. That’s to say nothing of hybrid work’s higher employee-retention rates, expanded recruitment opportunities and property savings.
If DOGE is truly interested in government efficiency, it won’t kill telework. It will instead focus on unloading underused properties, firing underperforming employees and building hybrid work arrangements that keep federal employees happy and productive.
It appears, however, that DOGE’s real goal isn’t so much to improve government efficiency, but rather to provoke the highest possible number of resignations. As Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy put it in these pages, “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”
This is a shame. Capable government employees are likely to abandon their posts for more family-friendly jobs in the private market and won’t be replaced. That could have a devastating effect on necessary government services.
Ms. Mack is author of “The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family.”
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