“Mr. Musk Goes to Washington.” And he’s planning to roll back remote work in the federal government.
Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and one-time presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy are expected to be appointed by incoming president Donald J. Trump to run an advisory commission called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump wants Musk to do to the federal bureaucracy what he did to Twitter — dramatically reduce the number of employees.
After Musk bought Twitter (in addition to changing its name to X, killing verification, enabling revenue sharing, increasing the character limit of posts, and other changes), he laid off 80% of the staff and issued an edict banning remote work.
The first step in the nearly impossible mission of radically downsizing government while using those agencies and their employees to govern the nation (CBS Daily Report newsman John Dickerson likened it to dismantling an airplane while flying it) is to implement a draconian mandate to work in offices rather than from home.
The expectation is that the in-office mandate will inspire thousands of employees to quit, reducing the number of employees who will have to be laid off. (Hey, if it worked for Twitter, it should work for history’s biggest-budget and most complex organization.)
A policy ending remote work mandated by Musk (who might well be ineligible for such a role given that his task will be to advise on downsizing or eliminating agencies charged with regulating or even currently investigating Musk-owned or Musk-run companies) contradicts findings by the government itself.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics found that remote work increased productivity across 61 private business sectors. Even more intuitively, non-labor costs, like office space, decreased more in industries with more remote work. Workers benefited from not commuting, which saved them time and money.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a study that telework in US businesses improved employee productivity and morale and helped companies hire and retain employees — something the DOGE is not interested in. (The GAO acknowledged that the long-term effects are unknown.)
In short, the government found that remote work is more efficient. The Department of Government Efficiency’s first order of business will be to make government less efficient.
The most efficient, cost-effective policy would be to lay off whomever you’re going to cull, but mandate remote work for the remaining employees.
According to the GAO, government employees in the Executive branch (more than four million people, including military personnel) often work from home. That practice varies by department, ranging from 11% of total hours worked at the Farm Service Agency to around 66% at the Veterans Benefits Administration.
One impact of a new government mandate to work in offices, beyond the expected employee downsizing, will be more employees on the market looking for work, which could affect hiring, salaries, and corporate remote work policies in the private sector.
Changes in attitudes, but fewer changes in lattitudes
Meanwhile, there’s been an enormous shift in attitudes among business leaders about remote work in recent months (and by extension, all its variants of flex work, digital nomad living, workations, and bleisure travel). According to the KPMG 2024 CEO Outlook report, which surveyed more than 1,300 CEOs globally — including 400 in the United States — the pendulum has swung decisively against CEOs supporting remote work.
According to the survey, 34% of CEOs favored an in-office model earlier this year. Now, 79% do, which is a massive change.
CEOs are increasingly willing to offer incentives to encourage employees to return to the office. A big majority (86%) of CEOs said they would reward employees who try to come into the office with benefits such as favorable assignments, raises, or promotions.
Why CEOs like back-to-office mandates
CEOs (like Musk, Ramaswamy, and, for that matter, Trump) typically favor remote work for themselves, but oppose it for their employees. These leaders have both good reasons and bad for opposing remote work.
Among the good reasons, they believe that in-person collaboration generates more and better ideas than remote collaboration.
While this may be true, it reveals a bias in favor of collaboration and against deep work (long, quiet, uninterrupted, and focused solitary work). Different companies, professions, departments, and industries benefit in varying ways from collaboration and deep work, and they’re both valuable. Office work best enables the former, and remote work the latter. But deep work is the more monetarily valuable kind of work, according to Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success In a Distracted World.
CEOs also point out that physical proximity is better for mentoring, innovation, and maintaining company culture.
On the flip side, CEOs don’t trust their employees to work hard at home and fear they’re watching daytime TV in their pajamas while on the clock. They intuit office presence and the supervision of employees who appear to be working as a metric for productivity. They can feel personally more comfortable when they can walk around, interact with employees, and manage and supervise in person. Some CEOs also feel the need to justify their spending on office space, office equipment, and other costs associated with office work.
Whatever the reasons, there’s a general disagreement between employees, who mostly want the option to work from home, and CEOs, who mostly want to require employees to come into the office.
A prediction
The remote work revolution will take a serious hit next year, both in government and business. Then, with new generations of workers and leaders gradually rising in the workforce in the coming decade, plus remote work-enabling technologies like AI (specifically agentic AI) and augmented reality growing in capability, remote work will make a slow, inevitable, and permanent comeback.
In the meantime, 2025 will be a rough year for remote workers. Bu it also represents a huge opportunity for startups and even established companies to hire the very best employees who are turned away elsewhere because they insist on working remotely.