Elon Musk has revealed the first step he intends to take in his new role in the emerging administration of Donald Trump: the abolition of remote work. Musk was appointed to head a new body whose job it is to work to reduce government expenses, and according to him the return of public employees to offices will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
The body, called the "Office of Government Efficiency" has already been abbreviated to DOGE, which is a tribute to Musk's favorite cryptocurrency (Dogecoin). He will head it together with former Republican presidential primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and the three main goals that have been set are deregulation as much as possible, cutting the workforce and increasing efficiency.
"With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government," Ramaswamy and Musk wrote in a column published last week in the Wall Street Journal. "We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail. Now is the moment for decisive action. Our top goal for DOGE is to eliminate the need for its existence by July 4, 2026 – the expiration date we have set for our project. There is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud."
In the first phase, the two plan to act against remote work and even hybrid work among government employees, and threatened that those who do not agree to come to the office five days a week will have to look for work in the private sector. They hope that this requirement will lead to a wave of voluntary retirements, which will help them in their efforts to cut manpower.
They wrote that: "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."
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President-elect Donald Trump tapped Elon Musk to head the office of government eficiency
(צילום: Allison Robbert/Pool via AP)
In the meantime, no exact data has been revealed regarding the number of employees who will be laid off, but it is estimated that the plan will be based on the 80% cut that Musk applied to Twitter employees after the purchase of the platform in 2022. During the election campaign, Musk announced that the goal is to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. It is not certain that they will meet this high goal, but it is estimated that the cuts will be in part in the Defense Department budget as well as in related expenses such as the $300 million allocated to the Planned Parenthood organization, which provides health services for women.
Their main claim is that a significant part of the government's expenses are determined by politicsand not by the elected officials. "It is anti-democratic and contrary to the vision of our founders," they wrote. "And this imposes huge direct and indirect costs on the taxpayers."