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One of President Donald Trump’s first actions upon entering the White House was to order federal employees to return to the office.
The government workforce, he has repeatedly contended, could not be productive from home.
“I happen to be a believer that you have to go to work. I don’t think you can work from home,” Trump said on Feb. 11. “Nobody’s going to work from home, they’re going to be going out, they’re going to play tennis, they’re going to play golf. They’re going to do a lot of things. They’re not working.”
Three days later, Trump traveled to his sprawling Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, where he remained for parts of six consecutive days, according to an NBC News tracker. On one of the days, Trump signed two executive orders and a memorandum. He also held an impromptu press conference.
In other words, he worked from home.
That weekend, he did what he accused federal workers of doing: He went golfing. Between Feb. 14 and Feb. 19, he golfed on four different days. While he is far from the first president to do so, each golfing trip is a cost to taxpayers.
Before that, Trump hosted Republican senators at Mar-a-Lago in early February, where he delivered remarks including an update on his administration’s cost-cutting efforts.
Some federal workers said Trump’s frequent trips to his luxury estate in Florida — racking up millions of dollars in security and transportation costs — while ordering millions of government employees back to the office, reeked of hypocrisy.
“It’s clear and should be to the rest of Americans that it’s never about ‘the rule,’ it’s about who’s making the rules,” said a federal employee with the Department of Education who is also a disabled veteran. “This all fits in so perfectly to the power dynamics installed by this administration — a dynamic where Trump does what he wants, to who he wants, without repercussions.”
“The return-to-office mandate was never about effectiveness, collaboration or cohesion,” the employee added. “It was always about federal employees being ‘traumatically affected,’ as Russell Vought put it.”
The White House did not return a request for comment.
Vought was a principal author of Project 2025, which came up frequently in the 2024 presidential election. Among the many tenets in the vast conservative governing blueprint is a call to significantly shrink the workforce and expand presidential power, both of which are playing out as central thrusts of the Trump administration so far. Trump has empowered billionaire Elon Musk, his biggest donor who is also a defense contractor, to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to root out what it deems wasteful and unnecessary spending.
Trump and Musk have said the federal government is bloated, and the administration has slashed tens of thousands of federal jobs already. Meanwhile, Trump’s agenda would add trillions of dollars to the federal debt, budget experts say.
At the same time, Trump has hit the links 14 times to date in his second term, with a potential for more rounds expected in the immediate future. Just since January, the cost of Trump’s golf weekends to taxpayers is more than $18 million, according to one analysis.
Trump has spent five of his seven weekends as president at Mar-a-Lago, and during a sixth, he overnighted at another Trump property in Miami. This Friday, according to a Federal Aviation Administration notice, the president was back at Mar-a-Lago, where he’s expected to remain until Sunday evening. His motorcade was heading to his golf club Saturday afternoon. That would then be the seventh of eight weekends that he would spend entirely or partly away from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
At the same time, since his Jan. 20 inauguration, Trump and Musk have regularly denigrated the federal workforce as lazy and emblematic of waste and fraud.
“I feel very badly, but many of them don’t work at all,” Trump said of fired federal workers on Wednesday while providing no basis for those comments. “Many of them never showed up to work. That’s not good.”
A report compiled by the White House budget office said that as of May 2024, 54% of the 2.28 million-strong civilian federal workforce worked in person, while 46.4% were eligible to work remotely. The report said 10% of civilian personnel actually worked in remote-only positions.
One Health and Human Services employee panned Trump’s comments as false and argued that critics of federal workers don’t realize that the public is actually getting more work from employees who are based at home and not having to spend time commuting. She also called Trump’s frequent trips to Mar-a-Lago “a bad look” when considering he says he wants to send a message about saving taxpayer money.
Another jabbed at Musk’s negative comments toward federal workers in light of a Politico report that, at Musk’s request, a “massive TV” was installed in the billionaire’s office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building so he could play video games.
“I personally work my a– off. I know everyone else is. I routinely work 50 to 60 hours a week,” and longer whenever needed, the HHS employee said. “Who is going to do all this work when they’re done with these cuts? Do people think that the public won’t be affected?”
Another worker told of colleagues attempting to quickly sell their homes to move closer to a train stop, while others were struggling to find extended hours of day care to cover the extra time for commuting. Some — including those who were exclusively hired to work remotely — will likely be forced to quit.
“Everyone built their lives around these remote positions,” said a Veterans Affairs employee who is on leave with a newborn. “My supervisor lives in [Florida] and was hired as a remote employee. She can’t relocate.”
As far as presidents, Trump is not alone in his travels home. As president, Joe Biden frequently traveled to his home in Wilmington, Delaware, on the taxpayer dime. Then-first lady Jill Biden was also called out for a costly trip as she was attempting to be at Hunter Biden’s side during his trial. Amid criticism, Joe Biden at the time said he continued to hold meetings and work while home. One analysis in 2022 found that Biden’s Delaware trips at that point cost taxpayers $11 million. Barack Obama would also travel to Hawaii for vacations, which was far more costly of a journey than Palm Beach would be, said Tom Fitton, president of the legal group Judicial Watch.
The group has tracked the costs of presidential travel since Obama’s presidency and calculated that his vacations over eight years cost taxpayers at least $85 million. In an interview, Fitton said that figure may be conservative given that it was not as inclusive of ancillary costs that are often part of calculations today.
“That’s a point. It’s not a big one,” Fitton said of Trump working from Mar-a-Lago even though he ordered employees back to the office.
“He’s obviously president 24/7. There’s really no comparison between a president golfing on the weekend versus an employee who doesn’t really have to go into the office at all. Or whose job duties and responsibilities are [not] essential to the government,” Fitton said.
He also noted: “Presidential golfing is a perennial issue.”
Trump had said he wouldn’t golf when president. In his first run for office in 2016, Trump bashed Obama for his golfing habits and repeatedly contended that the public wouldn’t see him on the course if he were president.
“I love golf, but if I were in the White House, I don’t think I’d ever see Turnberry again,” he said in February 2016, in a reference to a course he owns in Scotland. “I don’t think I’d ever see Doral again,” he also said, in a reference to his course in Miami. “I don’t ever think I’d see anything — I just want to stay in the White House and work my a– off.”
Already this year he has golfed on the Doral course in Miami that he once said he wouldn’t have time to visit.
Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said every president is expected to take days off to recharge while getting Secret Service protection. Bookbinder said the tension, though, is Trump’s current emphasis on cutting waste even while frequently golfing. Bookbinder also pointed to another unusual circumstance involving Trump.
“He is not just going to his home. He’s going to the business that he owns. And so every time he makes a trip, that brings money into his business, which puts money in his pockets,” Bookbinder said. “At the same time that he is bemoaning waste and fraud in the federal government, he’s actually through this travel having taxpayers pay his businesses, which makes him richer. That seems problematic and like a real level of irony when there’s so much emphasis on cutting down on government, police, fraud and abuse.”
Natasha Korecki is a senior national political reporter for NBC News.
Megan Shannon is a desk assistant with NBC News Washington.
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