President-elect Trump’s focus on the federal workforce has sparked alarm among employees as they take center stage in discussions about transforming government.
"Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) co-leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have floated a number of plans targeting federal workers, including plans to end telework.
And GOP lawmakers in Congress’s two DOGE caucuses have pushed for relocating government agencies outside of Washington and codifying Trump’s prior Schedule F order that would make it easier to fire federal employees.
Federal employees have long felt like a punching bag, but the renewed rhetoric is escalating fears over how they may be targeted.
“The sort of broadsides against federal employee telework paint a picture of federal employees as people who are committing fraud against the American people, and collecting paychecks without performing the duties of their jobs, which is simply not true,” said Jacqueline Simon, public policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).
Many of the policies being considered DOGE leaders suggest they see federal employee attrition as an added benefit of their push.
“If you require most of those federal bureaucrats to just say, like normal working Americans, you come to work five days a week, a lot of them won't want to do that,” Ramaswamy said during a November appearance on Fox News.
“If you have many voluntary reductions in force of the workforce in the federal government along the way, great. That's a good side effect of those policies as well.”
Senate DOGE Caucus member Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) has said federal workers need “to climb out of the bubble bath, put away the golf clubs, and get back to work” and has also pledged to put a “bloated” bureaucracy “on a permanent diet.”
Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.), who said he has more than 50,000 federal workers in his district, argued the rhetoric “wrongly vilifies a lot of people who are doing hard work and very good work for the United States.”
“I think we've seen especially when they shut down........