Federal workers brace for change amid DOGE rhetoric

President-elect Trump’s focus on the federal workforce has sparked alarm among employees as they take center stage in discussions about transforming government.

"Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) co-leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have floated a number of plans targeting federal workers, including plans to end telework.

And GOP lawmakers in Congress’s two DOGE caucuses have pushed for relocating government agencies outside of Washington and codifying Trump’s prior Schedule F order that would make it easier to fire federal employees.

Federal employees have long felt like a punching bag, but the renewed rhetoric is escalating fears over how they may be targeted.

“The sort of broadsides against federal employee telework paint a picture of federal employees as people who are committing fraud against the American people, and collecting paychecks without performing the duties of their jobs, which is simply not true,” said Jacqueline Simon, public policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).

Many of the policies being considered DOGE leaders suggest they see federal employee attrition as an added benefit of their push.

“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 during a November appearance on Fox News.

“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.”

Senate DOGE Caucus member Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) has said federal workers need “to climb out of the bubble bath, put away the golf clubs, and get back to work” and has also pledged to put a “bloated” bureaucracy “on a permanent diet.”

Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.), who said he has more than 50,000 federal workers in his district, argued the rhetoric “wrongly vilifies a lot of people who are doing hard work and very good work for the United States.”

“I think we've seen especially when they shut down the government previously how quickly the American people realize their actual benefits they get from having a government that does work, that sends their checks out, that answers their phone calls and helps them get the benefits they deserve,” he told The Hill.

Most federal workers ineligible for telework

The emphasis on telework clashes with data from the government, which notes that 54 percent of government employees aren’t even eligible to do so.

Of those who are permitted to telework, more than 60 percent of their working hours were spent at the office. 

Ten percent of the federal workforce are in positions where they are fully remote, but the extent to which telework is permitted is largely determined agency by agency.

Proponents of remote work argue it promotes many of the goals those in DOGE world say they are seeking.

It allows federal workers to move outside of D.C. at a time many Republicans are arguing they should be closer to the people they serve. Those outside the capital also no longer would be eligible to receive the higher pay rate for the region. And in cases where enough workers are fully remote, it can also save on office space.

“What we've seen in the private sector over the past year is that return to office mandates and even relocations are nothing more than layoffs — they're thinly veiled by the guise of efficiency,” said Laura Dodson, vice president of an AFGE union representing Economic Research Service (ERS), a research wing at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

She noted the official process for laying off federal employees requires advanced notice and severance pay.

“And I think that that's what's happening here is they don't want to go through the process of initiating a reduction in force … instead doing this forced return to office or relocations to basically have layoffs without any oversight.”

Relocations and Schedule F

Dodson is now working remotely, a status ignited after the first Trump administration pushed to move ERS to Kansas City, Kan., sparking an exodus from the agency.

Like with another relocation pushed under Trump, moving the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) headquarters to Grand Junction, Colo., subsequent government reports found the moves resulted in a massive brain drain of staff and disrupted functions while the moves themselves were costly to taxpayers.

A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that only 41 of the 176 BLM headquarters went ahead with the move, while the other 135 left the agency.

A similar dynamic played out at ERS and a sister agency, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, where both agencies lost half their staff as a result of the relocation.

A GAO report found that it took the agencies years to rebound from the loss of staff, ultimately hiring staff with less experience as it produced fewer research reports and took longer to award grants.

Another report found the relocation “was not fully consistent with an evidence-based approach.”

“It ended up costing money, not saving money, and it was an unsuccessful exercise by anybody's standards — brain drain, costs, operational efficiency — none of the stated goals were achieved,” Simon said.

Dodson said many of her coworkers eventually came back to the agency — but only once remote work was approved during the pandemic.

Trump has also said he plans to reissue an order signed in the waning days of his administration that created a new class of federal employees — Schedule F — who could be easily hired and fired much like political appointees.

The concern from federal workers is manifold, including that it would mean the end of the current merit-based hiring system used to fill roles and open the door to politicization of the workforce.

Bracing for backlash

In some circles, public employees have been preparing for possible backlash.

Jesus Soriano, president of an AFGE union representing National Science Foundation workers, said he’s aware of some employees who have gotten liability insurance in preparation for the incoming administration.

“At heart, I'm a public servant who works extremely hard, like my colleagues. We are not lazy, we are committed to service. So I'm having a hard time as a union leader grasping the reality that employees may be scared to that level of paying insurance to be able to access legal services, for instance,” he said.

The attacks don’t make sense to him, he said, because federal workers have been tapped to fulfill roles the government created.

“Career civil servants like us are hired based on merit and expertise. We do the work that Congress asks us to do; agencies are created because Congress decides to do so,” he said.

Ramaswamy has suggested that DOGE — which, despite its name, is an advisory commission — plans to think big and move swiftly.

“We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expect massive cuts among federal contractors and others who are over-billing the federal government,” he said on Fox.

“So yes, we expect all of the above, and I think people will be surprised by … how quickly we're able to move with some of those changes given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us,” he said.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who represents a D.C.-adjacent district full of federal workers, said, “In a perfect world, we hope it’s rhetoric. But Trump was not easy on federal employees the last time.”

“I've heard that for 10 years here — blaming everything on federal employees, missing the fact that we have an incredibly functional federal government compared to almost every nation in the world. We get an extraordinary amount done,” he said.

But Dodson said the tenor of the conversation around changing working conditions shows a huge gap between how DOGE leaders and workers view their performance.

“Especially with Vivek Ramaswamy’s comments it’s clear that their intention is not to improve the federal workforce, it's to reduce it. It's hard to find common ground on how to explain why the federal government is worthwhile to someone who doesn't believe it should exist,” she said.

“We're not out there trying to fleece the government by being on telework. We’re on telework to do our jobs.”