Mike Johnson and Elon Musk tell US federal staff to get back to the office

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Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he will support plans by Elon Musk to force US federal employees back to the office once Donald Trump re-enters the White House.

Speaking to reporters ahead of a meeting with Musk, who has been tasked by Trump with rooting out government inefficiency, Johnson cited a report which he claimed showed that only about “one per cent” of civil servants were actually working in their offices, if federal security guards and maintenance personnel were not counted.

The report, released on Thursday by Joni Ernst, the Republican senator for Iowa, claimed that “bureaucrats have been found in a bubble bath, on the golf course, running their own business, and even getting busted doing crime while on taxpayers’ time”.

Ernst’s report added that only 6 per cent of the federal workforce was in the office full-time and that not “a single headquarters of a major agency in Washington is even half-full”, with the average occupancy being just 12 per cent.

“That is absurd and it is not something the American people will stand for,” Johnson said of the report’s findings, adding that there would be a demand “from the new administration and from all of us in Congress that federal workers return to their desks”.

Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump has asked to co-run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, wrote in a Wall Street Journal article last month that they believed federal employees should be forced back to the office five days a week.

They predicted that this “would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome”, adding: “If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.”

Musk has pledged to use Doge to find $2tn worth of savings within the federal government, while Ramaswamy has said he would like to fire 75 per cent of the federal workforce. Neither has laid out detailed plans of how these goals will be achieved.

Calls for employees to return to the office full-time have been increasing in recent months. In September, Amazon told its staff they could no longer work from home from the start of next year, while Dell and PwC have issued similar mandates for some staff.

The Biden administration has also sought to crack down on government employees working from home, issuing guidance last year for agencies to “substantially increase meaningful in-person work at Federal offices, particularly at headquarters and equivalents”.