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Republican Home Speaker Mike Johnson has stated he’ll assist plans by Elon Musk to power US federal workers again to the workplace as soon as Donald Trump re-enters the White Home.
Talking to reporters forward of a gathering with Musk, who has been tasked by Trump with rooting out authorities inefficiency, Johnson cited a report which he claimed confirmed that solely about “one per cent” of civil servants have been really working of their workplaces, if federal safety guards and upkeep personnel weren’t counted.
The report, launched on Thursday by Joni Ernst, the Republican senator for Iowa, claimed that “bureaucrats have been present in a bubble tub, on the golf course, working their very own enterprise, and even getting busted doing crime whereas on taxpayers’ time”.
Ernst’s report added that solely 6 per cent of the federal workforce was within the workplace full-time and that not “a single headquarters of a serious company in Washington is even half-full”, with the typical occupancy being simply 12 per cent.
“That’s absurd and it’s not one thing the American folks will stand for,” Johnson stated of the report’s findings, including that there could be a requirement “from the brand new administration and from all of us in Congress that federal employees return to their desks”.
Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump has requested to co-run the so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity, wrote in a Wall Road Journal article final month that they believed federal workers must be pressured again to the workplace 5 days every week.
They predicted that this “would end in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome”, including: “If federal workers don’t need to present up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying house.”
Musk has pledged to make use of Doge to seek out $2tn price of financial savings inside the federal authorities, whereas Ramaswamy has stated he want to fireplace 75 per cent of the federal workforce. Neither has laid out detailed plans of how these targets will probably be achieved.
Calls for workers to return to the workplace full-time have been growing in current months. In September, Amazon informed its employees they may now not work at home from the beginning of subsequent yr, whereas Dell and PwC have issued comparable mandates for some employees.
The Biden administration has additionally sought to crack down on authorities workers working from house, issuing steerage final yr for companies to “considerably enhance significant in-person work at Federal workplaces, significantly at headquarters and equivalents”.
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