Work from home

President-elect Donald Trump’s appointees for his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are planning to crack down on employees who work from home — those who are left, anyway, after the duo’s round of “large-scale firings.”In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out “the DOGE plan to reform government,” in which they purport to “reverse a decades-long executive power grab” while “following the Supreme Court’s guidance.

Rejoice, slackers of America! For there is a new figurehead leading your crusade for lunchtime naps, camera-off Zoom meetings and sea-level productivity. Yes, Joe Biden has, finally, excelled at something: he is the president that has spent most time at home. According to CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller, who has been meticulously keeping tabs of Biden's days off, since taking the White House as his official residence, the president has traveled to his home in Delaware fifty-five times. Whether he’s practicing his cycling skills, injuring himself while playing with his dogs naked or lounging in his $2.

Cockburn spent his long weekend the same way most Americans did: reading the Functional Government Initiative’s recent report. It found that “on any given day from March-December 2020, between 20-30 percent of HHS employees did not appear to be working.” Government inefficiency is nothing new, but in this case teleworking is exacerbating the problem. And that isn’t about to improve — at least not under this administration. Biden continues to push for more teleworking options, even as the pandemic finally begins to fade. The Washington Free Beacon reports that Brian Harrison, the former HHS chief of staff who commissioned the investigation of telework participation, speculates that many recent federal agency errors may be due to an inactive teleworkforce.

One of the few good things to come out of the pandemic has been the option to work from home (WFH). According to a Stanford University study of 17,000 employees, 50 percent of respondents who stayed at their jobs without commuting wanted to keep working from home at least part-time after Covid. And a September 2021 survey by OwlLabs, a video conferencing platform, found that one in three people who have worked remotely since the outbreak would likely quit if they could not continue to do so. While undoubtedly pressured by the current worker shortage to accept WFH as an employment benefit, companies have come to appreciate how decentralized staffing can improve productivity and substantially lower overhead.