Trump to Fight Biden Admin’s Work-from-Home Protections for Federal Employees
“It’s ridiculous. So it was like a gift to a union, and we’re going to obviously be in court to stop it.”
The Biden administration has been working feverishly to “Trump-proof” the federal government before they hand over power on January 20.
Knowing that one of President-elect Donald Trump’s immediate priorities is to bring federal employees – many of whom have been working remotely since the early days of the pandemic – back into the office, Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley signed an agreement two weeks ago with the American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing 42,000 federal workers, to “lock in work-from-home protections” until 2029.
Bloomberg reported this story.
During Trump’s wide-ranging Monday press conference at Mar-a-Lago, he told reporters he plans to fight this deal in the courts.
Trump said, “We’re talking about a friendly takeover, a friendly transition as they like to say, this is a friendly transition, and it is. But there are two events that took place that I think are very terrible.”
He continued, “One is that if people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed, and somebody in the Biden administration gave a five-year waiver of that. So that for five years, people don’t have to come back into the office. It involved 49,000 people. For five years, they don’t have to go. They just signed this thing. It’s ridiculous. So it was like a gift to a union, and we’re going to obviously be in court to stop it.”
President-elect Trump threatened to fire federal employees who don’t come back to the office, and said he would go to court to challenge a Biden administration labor contract that locked in remote work arrangements for thousands of federal employees https://t.co/X2QZVgToIh pic.twitter.com/s9FexyK3xh
— Bloomberg (@business) December 16, 2024
AFGE National President Everett Kelley issued a statement in response to Trump’s remarks, arguing that telework and remote work have actually “helped the federal government increase productivity and efficiency, maintain continuity of operations, and increase disaster preparedness.” While that claim sounds a bit suspect, Kelley’s claim that remote work arrangements help government agencies recruit and retain top talent may be correct.
Kelley also downplayed the allegation that many federal employees are working remotely. He wrote, “More than half of federal employees cannot telework at all because of the nature of their jobs, only ten percent of federal workers are remote, and those who have a hybrid arrangement spend over sixty percent of working hours in the office.”
Finally and most importantly, he said, “Collective bargaining agreements entered into by the federal government are binding and enforceable under the law. We trust the incoming administration will abide by their obligations to honor lawful union contracts. If they fail to do so, we will be prepared to enforce our rights.”
It remains very unclear whether the Trump administration will be able to reverse this deal. It appears destined to be resolved by the courts who will have to consider the following questions.
During a transition period, does a federal official from the outgoing administration have the right to enter into a contract that will tie the hands of the incoming president for his entire four-year term and even the next president for the first year of his term?
(It should be noted that O’Malley resigned from his position just days after signing this agreement, as per Bloomberg. He’s no longer even part of the Biden administration.)
Even if it’s determined that O’Malley lacked the authority to do so, where does that leave the union, whose lawyers will argue had signed the agreement in good faith?
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), consider the elimination or reduction of remote work for federal workers as a way to cut wasteful government spending. Last month, the pair published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, in which they claimed, “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.”
🚨 BREAKING: Biden locks in "Work From Home" Deal for 42K Social Security workers until 2029!
This effectively locks in Deep State Fed workers so that Elon and Vivek at @DOGE cannot order them back into the office 5 days per week as planned.
DOGE should now just use Vivek's… pic.twitter.com/moCLMbY48U
— Publius (@OcrazioCornPop) December 3, 2024
Fox Business News reported that following the announcement of the agreement between the SSA and AFGE, Sen. Joni Ernst, (R-IA), the leader of the Senate’s DOGE caucus, called it “unacceptable” and said she intends to work with Musk and Ramaswamy to “fix this ASAP and get bureaucrats back to work.”
Unfortunately for the Trump administration, this agreement is only one of many obstacles the Biden administration has put in place to obstruct their agenda.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Brandon is selling parts of the border fence that have not been installed yet for pennies on the dollar. His Administration is doing things to prevent the Trump Administration from implementing its plans, and the media stenographers are silent.
I”m so old I remember when it was newsworthy when all the Clinton swine tore all the W keys off executive branch keyboards before departing.
IIRC, federal public sector unions were ok’ed by an EO. Simply put out a new EO abolishing them. Now, allow salaries and most benefits, but demand in person work.
The damage wrought by public sector unions to American society and to federal and state employee accountability cannot be overstated. What a cancer they’ve been.
Being a construction guy most of life I have faith in people who work at home. And during Covid scam on the country saw large offices I work at almost empty. I knew they wouldn’t go back without screaming. Government I read never got back.
I’m teleworking for medical reasons. Not going to the office anytime soon. I hope they know the difference.
And a lot of offices are back. I don’t know of any doing full time telework at this point.
Working from home is not inherently bad, and there are many situations where the location of the worker is irrelevant. Once you are communicating by telephone and email, it doesn’t matter where the other end of the message originates.
However, these are largely clerical/data positions albeit perhaps even with some interface with the public.
The positions that matter are management level where coordination is necessary. No matter how good Zoom has gotten it is not the same as five people in a meeting room. Meeting via Zoom still has a “video fireplace” element to it, where it’s not the same as the experience.
Sincerely,
Retired HR management.
I agree, management is key. And there’s plenty of bad ones.
Cool. ‘Work from home’ no problem. Log into zoom and project to a monitor on the desk at place of work. Breaks monitored, don’t violate the time restrictions. Speaking of violations, you gotta wear outfits IAW dress code.
Prepare for ‘supervisors’ to show up to your work site for evaluation and monitoring….. with the same lead time you got in the cubicle farm….zero. Oh your physical address is different than listed so you are defrauding the govt by getting locality pay for DC/NOVA when you’re actually in a lower cost location.
Better yet declare an ’emergency’ until the illegal aliens are sent packing. Transfer all these folks to a new joint federal border force. Let them clean up the trash left behind along the border and into the interior.
It just all depends on the kind of work being done. If you need managers to be present ton”check on staff” then you have one of two things, either you have the wrong people working for you or, more likely, you have the wrong people in management positions.
I’ve managed small and large teams over many decades and have always told them I couldn’t give a flying f88k where they are as long as they get the work done.
I’ve also worked for people who couldn’t manage you if they couldn’t see you. I can tell you which type of person I’d rather be working for and most people would agree with me.
Having said that, if you are a surgeon then clearly it’s not a job that can be done from anywhere for the most part 😂
“Having said that, if you are a surgeon then clearly it’s not a job that can be done from anywhere for the most part 😂”
Surgery on a patient in Cleveland done by a doctor in New York is a thing now. Robotic surgery has become quite amazing.
I love it, add constant monitoring via computer and surveillance cameras’.
The SSA is in the executive branch, so guess who is that commissioner’s boss? Potus. By extension, all 42,000 AFGE employees are in the executive branch. Their boss is also *checks notes* the potus.
Will the juice be worth the squeeze if Trump presses this point given only a small percenrage actually tele-commute?
The WSJ provided the answer: “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome…”
Be the Alpha. Flex that muscle. Bring the pain. Then turn around and re-institute tele-commuting to those who remain and qualify.
BOOYAH!!
I work remotely and have done so since 2010 across two different employers. I’ve never had a problem as I’m a self starter. You can find me at my desk with a cup of coffee at 04:00 daily.
Many people cannot do this and I’ve lost a fair number of colleagues because of it.
And zoom meetings are a double edged sword. I can attend meetings from Hawaii to Maine in the same day. Can’t do that any other way.
Like anything else, it needs to be managed.
I have been in quite a few offices in DC in the last year. Let’s just say that there were more people in the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. These places are absolute ghost towns. And it’s spooky to listen to your footsteps echoing in these empty buildings.
How many people are motivated to work? I bet that many of these people are slackers.
With the benefit if hindsight, it’s clear the only mistake Doge made is talking about what they were going to do before Biden left office. Everything that Trump will try to accomplish will be litigated to the fullest, unfortunately.
I mean, God forbid that the overpaid, unaccountable, entitled and generally useless federal apparatchiks/bureaucrats be required to commute to work, like the peasants of the proletariat whom the Dhimmi-crats loudly (but, fallaciously) profess to serve.
Another proposal that must be followed through on is relocating federal agency headquarters and offices out of the DMV and into the heartland and the south. I guarantee that myriad federal workers will leave their cushy sinecures, once forced to leave the cushy environs of D.C., Maryland or Virginia.
I work from home. I’m a programmer, meaning I type on a computer all day. This is work that is easily done from almost anywhere. But of course, if I don’t produce working code, the boss will notice and I will lose my job.
So President Trump’s best tool will be to focus on the work, not the location. If people don’t produce some quantity of work, you put them on a PIP (Personal Improvement Plan). One of the requirements of the PIP can then be that they come to the office where they can be monitored.
When (not if) they either fail to show up, or show up but still don’t work, fire them. The union contract won’t be able to stand in the way of that kind of firing for cause (though they’ll try).
The beautiful part is that this can be implemented even while litigation over the contract is still in the courts.
I am retired HR and was in Policy, and later, Compensation Design. I managed to push through a pretty simple system: anyone who had been in the bottom 5% of performers for two consecutive years MUST be placed on a 6 month PIP. Pretty low bar, right? Not going to catch too many people in that net. However in the three years my program existed not a single employee (in a company of 50,000) was terminated as a result of one of the mandatory PIP’s. Managers simply refused to fire people they had personally acknowledged were terrible employees.
I could never figure out why, but then, I did have a reputation as a heartless bastard
A friend of mine has worked at a 3-letter agency in the DC area as a contractor for at least the last 10 years. He told me that during COVID, the “guvvies” pretty much sat on their butts at home and collected paychecks for doing nothing. The only ones who still had to come to work were the watchstanders. Did anybody notice?
N
Not how it worked at my agency.
Jeffrey Toobin swears by home work. He says it makes employees more sticky.
The legal question is whether a President can enter into such an agreement, unilaterally, thus binding a future President. If the answer is yes, then what would prevent Trump, and all future Presidents, to likewise bind future Presidents. Can a President unilaterally enter into an agreement that binds all future Presidents for 5, 10, 50, 100, or a 1000 years? A sitting Congress can pass laws, but cannot bind a future Congress.
Challenge is appropriate here.
Also worthwhile that when targeting workforce reductions to prioritize those roles that are not in person. Additionally, make in-person attendance a consideration for all promotions or new positions.
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