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The union representing thousands of federal workers said it would fight any effort by President-elect Donald Trump to block a Biden administration agreement allowing thousands of federal workers to continue with remote work.
“It’s ridiculous,” Trump said Monday of the agreement Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley signed with the American Federation of Government Employees extending telework protections until 2029 before he stepped down last month.
Trump, who spoke to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort, called the deal “very terrible,” and said it’s interfering with his plans for how to handle the federal workforce, which includes ending remote work. He said he would seek to challenge the rule in court.
“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,” Trump said at his first post-election news conference at Mar-a-Lago.
“They just signed this thing,” he said. “So, it was like a gift to a union, and we are going to obviously be in court to stop it,” Trump added.
In a statement later Monday, AFGE National President Everett Kelley said the union would fight any effort to strip those protections.
“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.
“Telework and remote work are tools that have helped the federal government increase productivity and efficiency, maintain continuity of operations, and increase disaster preparedness,” he added.
The White House declined to provide a comment. The SSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ending work-from-home is a key priority of two of Trump’s top advisers, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, who are set to lead efforts to increase government efficiency and reduce costs.
Ramaswamy told Tucker Carlson after Trump’s election victory that he believed ending remote work would lead to mass resignations.
“Just tell them they have to come back five days a week from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” Ramaswamy told Carlson, predicting it would lead to a “25% thinning out of the federal bureaucracy right there.”
In his statement, 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,” Kelley said
Trump touted the work Musk and Ramaswamy have been doing in the press conference, saying they’re aiming to “eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud. And I can only tell you, I’ll give you a little early report, they’re finding things that you wouldn’t even believe. So we’re looking to save maybe $2 trillion.”
Proponents of workers returning to the office include Democratic Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. She told reporters last month that more federal workers going back to work in the city would bring “vibrancy back to our town.”
Dareh Gregorian is a politics reporter for NBC News.
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