President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to challenge the Biden administration's recent protections for work-from-home government employees during a recent press conference at Mar-a-Lago. On Monday, Trump held a press conference where he plans on challenging the Biden administration's deal with the Social Security Administration (SSA) union that would continue to allow federal employees to work from home throughout the duration of Trump's term in office.  Many are viewing this action as a sneaky way to undermine Trump's view of an efficient and accountable federal government.
(Video Credit: Fox News) “We’re talking about a friendly takeover, a friendly transition as they like to say, this is a friendly transition, and it is,” the President-elect said. “But there are two events that took place that I think are very terrible. 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,” Trump told reporters. The former SSA Commissioner Martin O'Malley and the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) struck a deal with the Biden administration which “places current levels of telework into our National Agreement through October 25, 2029.”
Bloomberg News reported that the deal would affect 42,000 workers and possibly protect those from scrutiny and accountability.
The SSA union's chapter president, Rich Couture, described the deal allowing "current levels of telework." AFGE National President Everett Kelley pledged to fight any undoing of Biden's deal.
“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,” Kelley said responding to Trump's Mar-a-Lago comments. In an attempt to downplay Biden's sweetheart deal with the union, Kelley said “Rumors of widespread federal telework and remote work are simply untrue. 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." Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will immediately review this situation as their mission is to find and eliminate government waste. “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,” said DOGE co-leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. “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. "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.”