Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy Call for Five-Day Workweeks for Federal Employees

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-leaders of what President-elect Donald J. Trump has called the Department of Government Efficiency, said on Wednesday that they supported requiring federal employees to work from the office five days a week as part of a broad overhaul of the civil service.

The change, they wrote in an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal, could 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,” they wrote.

In their column, Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy described some of the early aims of the department, which Mr. Trump had said would operate outside of the government and offer input to federal officials. Mr. Musk has promised to eliminate $2 trillion from the annual United States budget, and has said that the government needs only 99 agencies, not more than 400.

Part of the group’s task — cutting down the number of federal regulations — would be providing “sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy wrote.

The two men have been advising Mr. Trump’s transition team to hire what they said were “small-government crusaders” to work with the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

To accomplish the reductions, Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy wrote, federal appointees working with the efficiency department would identify a minimum number of employees to perform “constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions,” with the number of workers cut proportionate to the number of regulations scrapped.

Mr. Ramaswamy has already outlined his support for five-day workweeks at federal agencies, telling Tucker Carlson recently that such a mandate could lead to a “25 percent thinning out of the federal bureaucracy.”

“You don’t even have to talk about you’re in a mass firing, a mass exodus,” Mr. Ramaswamy said on “The Tucker Carlson Show.” “Just tell them they have to come back five days a week from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.”

A report issued earlier this year by the Office of Management and Budget found that federal employees who were eligible to work remotely were still spending more than 60 percent of their work hours in offices. Of the 2.3 million civilian workers working for the government in May, the report said, 1.1 million were eligible for telework and about 228,000 were eligible for entirely remote work.

Mr. Trump has promised to reinstitute an executive order he issued late in his term known as Schedule F, which would empower his administration to convert tens of thousands of civil servants to so-called at-will employees, who could more easily be fired. President Biden revoked the order.

“Employees whose positions are eliminated deserve to be treated with respect,” Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy wrote in The Journal, adding that the efficiency department would “help support their transition into the private sector.”

“The president can use existing laws to give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit,” they wrote.