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By Kate Gibson
Edited By Alain Sherter
/ CBS News
President Trump is requiring millions of federal employees to return to the office.
In an order issued Monday, the White House instructed all U.S. government departments and agencies in the executive branch to end remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work on a full-time basis. Department heads can exempt some workers from the requirement.
The executive order was one of a blizzard of actions announced by Mr. Trump on the day of his inauguration, including directives on the economy, immigration and climate change.
The president also reinstated a policy to remove job protections from tens of thousands of government workers, a step toward possibly letting the White House revamp agencies by filling them with those politically aligned with Mr. Trump.
The executive order was one of multiple directives targeting the federal workforce of 2.3 million that in addition to the return-to-office mandate includes a hiring freeze, revamped hiring rules and other moves to make career senior employees easier to fire.
The White House called the steps necessary to curtail what Mr. Trump and his supporters view as a “deep state” who fought his actions during the president’s first term.
“There have been numerous and well-documented cases of career Federal employees resisting and undermining the policies and directives of their executive leadership,” stated one of the executive orders signed by the president on Monday evening. “Principles of good administration, therefore, necessitate action to restore accountability to the career civil service.”
Critics view the touted-in-advance policy as an effort to topple the heart of civil service, in which people are hired based on merit and can’t be arbitrarily dismissed.
The government jobs included professional employees who work as border patrol officers, meat inspectors and those overseeing clean-air regulations.
The return-to-office directive is expected to face a fight from federal unions, some of which have remote work written into their contract.
One union that represents government workers bashed the mandate as going back to the patronage system that oversaw the federal workforce until the end of the 19th century.
“Every American has a stake in ensuring that federal employees remain free to carry out the mission of the agencies that employ them without fear of political interference,” stated Everett Kelly, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 800,000 workers in the federal government and the government of the District of Columbia.
Kelly called Mr. Trump’s directives “a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees’ due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons.”
Kate Gibson is a reporter for CBS MoneyWatch in New York, where she covers business and consumer finance.
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