Will the federal government become a toxic employer?

Sorting fact from fiction on mass firings, relocations, and return-to-office policies

Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s proposal for changing government has, thus far, been disheartening. They want to change things, but it is hard to take the whole enterprise seriously when you have to spend a lot of time sorting through their mixture of vagueness, misstatements, and hyperbole. Doing so made made me realize: I don’t think Muskawamy themselves actually know what they are doing.

Like Trump, they don’t know much about government, except as businessmen. Like Trump, they are serial bullshitters, who do not seem to value basic public service tasks and, for Musk in particular, given to conspiracy theories. And there is the rub. They will make big promises without knowing if they can fulfill them, and wild claims without knowing if they are true. But the point is to hold our attention, to convey the message that the government is broken, and to justify radical actions, even if the consequences of those actions are unknown, or, clearly damaging to state capacity.

One thing is clear: for all the “government should work like a business” rhetoric, private organizations are typically not led by people who oppose the mission of the organization, make sweeping reorganizations that are not informed by basic operational facts, or make a habit of denigrating their employees. This is because that sort of toxic leadership would get you fired. But this is the sort of vibe that Musk and Ramaswamy are bringing to the table.

Previously, I broke down some of their claims about federal spending. Now, lets look at what they have been saying about the federal personnel system, and sort out fact and fiction.

They Can’t Fire Lots of Employees, But Can Encourage the Best Ones to Leave

One problem with Muskawamy is that they can’t give a straight answer about what they will do and how they plan to do it. It will be amazing, and historic, but lets not get into the details. “It’s going to be very easy,” said Elon Musk’s Mom, who is apparently sitting in on her big boy’s meetings.

Their claims will work for a MAGA audience, or for people who do not understand how government works, but start to vaporize when forced to engage with reality. And soon they will actually be in power, so reality will start to matter.

Lets take the example of firing employees. As a presidential candidate, and until relatively recently, Ramaswamy claimed that the president could fire 75% of federal civilian employees. Ramaswamy uses the trick of citing an old and obscure law, claiming that it enables radical actions, and hope that no-one checks up on the details. In this case, he refers to the Reorganization Act of 1977. But, the Reorganization Act was about reorganizations of federal agency structure, not layoffs. The Act also requires the President to go to Congress to get permission to pursue his actions. Also, the Act has expired. And in 1983 the Supreme Court found its mechanisms of operating to be unconstitutional!

In short then, Ramaswamy claims that an expired and unconstitutional piece of legislation from the Carter era gives Trump a power unmentioned in the legislation. This also applies to the claim that the President can unilaterally eliminate agencies. Again, reorganization authority has expired, so the President does not have this power. Only Congress can create or eliminate an agency or Department.

Notably, in his Wall Street Journal op-ed with Musk (which was presumably written by someone from a Trump-aligned think tank like Heritage or America First Policy Institute), Ramaswamy is no longer talking about the Reorganization Act. At this point, it is no longer feasible to pretend this gimmick is real. That does not mean that his other promises are realistic, just that they reflect more sophistication.

Instead, Muskawamy rely on Section 3301 of Title V, Code of Federal Regulations, to promise “large-scale firings.” That section gives the President power to “prescribe such regulations for the admission of individuals into the civil service in the executive branch as will best promote the efficiency of that service.” I am emphasizing the “into” because the section is clearly about hiring, not firing. (See more from Nicholas Bednar on this point).

Jennifer Nou, an administrative law professor at the University of Chicago told me it is “likely illegal” that the President can pursue mass firings based on this Section 3301, with the uncertainty of the “likely” reflecting less the plain text of the law than how far certain Judges will allow Trump to go. She also points out that adverse action policymaking is limited to the Office of Personnel Management, and would require a new rule that has to follow the timing and evidence of the Administrative Procedure Act, a constraint that Muskawamay explicitly reject.

Even if such mass firings were feasible, they are bad personnel policy. Jennifer Pahlka points out that Part 351 of Title V means that reductions in force must first eliminate specific term and temporary positions, those under various special authorities, plus those in the first three years of service, before reaching career employees, and then prioritizing non-veterans first.¹ This means younger employees, and employees with specific skills like digital expertise, will be the first to go.

So, the strategy will be to fire lower-paid younger hires bringing new skills into government? Genius. Term employees tend to be people with niche skills that are difficult to hire for via traditional civil service means. For example, the US Digital Service has hired a lot of innovative talent this way, exactly the type of people who can update government services for a digital age. A policy that systematically removes younger innovators from government is a disaster. As Pahlka says:

If long-term gain is broadly what they want, and a shock to the system is how they want to get it, firing term appointees, those hired under special authorities, and those recently hired is a terrible way to do it. What you’ll be left with is the employees who’ve been there the longest and have the most invested in the system as it stands.

Muskawamy promise to make cuts that “use existing laws to give [employees] incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit.” This, they can do. The Clinton administration did so in the 1990s to reduce the number of employees. The criticism of this approach is a) it will never generate the numbers that Muskawamy are claiming need to go, b) the people most likely to leave are those who are at retirement age, or feel confident that they can land a job in the labor market. In other words, this is not a good tool for sorting good from bad employees, and is most likely to be used by people with the most marketable skills, while keeping in place employees who doubt that they can land a job in the private sector.

Workforce Relocations

Other Muskawamy strategies center on the idea that making the federal government a terrible place to work is a great way to make it work better. This involves mandatory relocations and forcing telework employees back into the office.

Muskawamay has called for “relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area” while Trump proposed removing about 1 in 3 of DC area workers, moving them to another setting.

Why? The vast majority of federal employees, about 85%, are already not in DC. So what is the benefit in further relocations?

Trump is drawing from an AFPI proposal which claims big savings. Trump already relocated a couple of offices in his first term and so we can look at the record rather than take his work for it. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office pointed out that the claimed savings were based on false accounting. Relocations reduced the capacity of the offices involved, because they triggered mass departures. When the Bureau of Land Management had its headquarters moved, 87% of employees left. The results were bad enough that the Biden administration moved the office back to DC.

The relocation of US Department of Agriculture research units saw about half of its staff leave, and productivity decline because of the departures and the reliance on less experienced replacements. The number of staff eventually returned (limiting claimed savings), thanks to the pandemic-era expansion of remote work, but the moves also significantly reduced the number of Black employees in the organization.

None of this matter if reducing workforce is the purpose of the move, and you don’t care about the effects on capacity. OMB Director Mick Mulvaney crowed that relocations were a “wonderful way” to effectively fire employees. The AFPI also houses the Trump officials who proposed the Schedule F executive order to allow Trump to fire career civil servants. Their interest is consistently in making the government a worse place to work rather than make it work better.

Return-to-Office Policies

Muskawamy also have promised to compel federal employees to return to the office five days a week. If you think this is about performance, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that Muskawamy both want a) to move more jobs out of DC, and b) want all DC employees in the office five days a week. In fact, they are pretty up front that the purpose of return to work policies is not to improve government efficiency, but that it “would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”

Here are some basic things about return-to-office that Muskawamy would benefit from understanding.

• People differ on the value of remote work and telework. But it is certainly not clear that in-person work is better. Private companies that have adopted return-to-office policies have seen slower growth.

• Telework can be a useful tool to attract a broader pool of employees. This is especially likely to be true if your headquarters is in an expensive region like DC. Federal managers I have spoken with consistently say that telework and remote work (where an employee is hired with no expectation of an in-office work) allows them to access a much broader pool of talent then they could otherwise find.

• The idea that telework is some public sector perk while the real America is toiling at their offices is false. Private sector companies use remote work at about the same rate as public organizations.

• Most federal work is in-person. About 54% of federal employees work fully on-site, and the remainder can use telework. If you exclude remote workers, which is about 10% of federal employees, almost 80% of regular hours work occur in-person, and 61% of work for those who are telework eligible.

• The suitability of telework depends on the task. For TSA staff or Veterans Health doctors, telework does not make sense. And guess what? Those sort of jobs are mostly not offered telework options! About 94% of work occurs in person in Veterans Affairs, and about 85% of work at Homeland Security. By contrast, the rate for the National Science Foundation is about 42%, which mirrors university-style work environments that they are similar to. (Anyone who actually cares about this sort of detail, and agency justifications for their use work of telework can find more information here).

• Forcing employees back to the office will have to contend with labor agreements that provide telework options. Social Security is one of a number of agencies that have rushed telework options in collective bargaining agreements. If you are genuinely interested in improving public services, there are other more productive fights to pick with public sector unions.

Since the federal government is a vast employer with lots of different jobs and needs, it is entirely possible to build policies around remote work that are nuanced and will improve services. A one-size-fit-all approach is dumb, and the use of punitive return-to-office policies to drive people out is going to hurt state capacity. And guess what? The federal government largely has the former type of policy, delegating authority to agencies, requiring them to justify the use of telework vs. in-person with an emphasis on pushing them toward at least half of work to be in-person. Muskawamy want the dumb one-size-fits-all policy.

Turning the Federal Government into a Toxic Employer

There is a general willingness to believe that business executives can bring new insights and practices to government services. And in some cases, that is true. See, for example, Bob McDonald under Obama, who brought a customer focus to Veterans Affairs. But it is hard to avoid the impression that Muskawamy are winging it, largely driven by a conviction that making the federal government a terrible place to work is fine, because nothing that federal employees does has any value.

A serious reform would not put Marjorie Taylor Greene in charge of the Congressional subcommittee that is supposed to work with DOGE. The fact that Mike Johnson appointed one of his party’s leading conspiracy nuts suggests that the purpose of the committee is not to do much more than to trash government. Indeed, Greene has promised on social media to “gut useless government agencies” and “expose people who need to be FIRED.” This feeds into the perception that a key DOGE strategy is to force public employees to quit because of toxic employment conditions. For example, Musk has been attacking individual employees on social media, and many are worried about being fired via Trump’s Schedule F executive order.

In an interview with CNBC where he spoke about DOGE, Ramaswamy bemoaned:

this culture of fear that’s caused people to have fear of losing their job. I don’t want to speak for maybe many in the audience would worry about that culture of fear, even in corporate America, over the last several years.

Ramaswamy was, presumably, talking about cancel culture, using an exaggerated claim that ideological values threatened people’s jobs. But the point applies better to his own campaign to purge the bureaucracy. Cultures of fear are bad, especially in the workplace! But that is exactly the type of culture that Muskawamay are creating.

Federal employees are scrubbing their social media for anything that might be perceived as being critical of Trump, or even on topics of expertise, such as a National Weather Service scientist deleting tweets about climate change. Some are taking out insurance in the case of lawsuits or firings. One career official who testified about Trump’s lawbreaking during the first impeachment is planning on leaving.

Nicholas Bednar, who has argued that undermining administrative capacity also hurts President ability to acheive their policy goals, uses Customs and Border Protection as an example of the costs of attacks on public servants. CBP is the Trumpiest of public agencies. It’s core mission is to perform the task that Trump prioritizes the most, and its union and leadership have been vocally supportive of Trump. But CBP faces a problem, which is that it has a reputation as a dysfunctional agency:

Rhetoric attacking civil servants and unstable personnel policy make it difficult for agencies to recruit new employees. In many cases, this is consistent with the Trump administration’s desire to shrink government. In other cases, it may pose a problem for Trump’s vision. For example, Trump has promised to hire 10,000 new Border Patrol agents. Despite congressional authorization to increase the hiring of agents, the number of job applicants has generally decreased since 2018 while the agency’s rate of attrition has increased. Morale is a significant problem. Since 2005, Customs and Border Protection has scored in the lowest quartile on government surveys that measure employee satisfaction.

What the CBP shows is that a political party can be so anti-state that they undermine their ability to achieve their own policy goals. Given the aging federal workforce, making hiring work better is exactly where the new administration should be focusing their energies. But even a better-designed hiring process will struggle to overcome a reputation of a workplace where employment is arbitrary, your employer denigrates you in public, and the workplace is hopelessly politicized.

Federal Employees Should Stick It Out If They Can

In short then, Muskawmay cannot make the large scale firings they propose, although Trump likely will be allowed to use Schedule F to fire people. They can offer early retirement, and eliminate new hires, and pursue return-to-office policies, but these are imprecise tools likely to remove better employees and undermine government capacity.

The case that any of these tools will be used to improve government is weak, for the very good reason that the political principals don’t really want efficiency. Trump wants loyalty. When Muskawmay say they want efficiency, they just mean fewer employees. Since they assume all government employees are a waste, they are indifferent about who leaves and through what mechanism.

And again, what is all of this for? Federal employee personnel pay is a small fraction of the federal budget. It is less than half of what is spent in contracts. It is less than what one department, Defense, spends on contracts.

Despite all of this, federal employees who can stomach sticking around should do so. Because Muskawamy don’t know what they are doing, things may move more slowly, and not be as bad as predicted. They are hoping people will leave, so why give them the win?

Max Stier, who leads the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service is urging federal employees tempted to resign to stick around. He put it better than I could:

I am asking you — pleading with you: stay. Your decision isn’t just about your career, or a single president. It’s part of a larger war, one waged throughout American history, over what the federal government can and should be: Is it an apolitical source of expertise and professionalism, or is it a partisan weapon for presidents to use for their own political or economic ends? Now, with Trump and his allies setting civil servants in their sights, we risk backsliding to an earlier time, when cronyism reigned — and Americans suffered. By staying in your position as long as you can, you can defend the work of our democracy…As you weigh your options, I hope you will consider the profound impact your choice will have on our democracy. I can’t promise you that Trump won’t make your work hard. I can’t promise you that you won’t face budget cuts and layoffs. But if you abandon your posts before they make you, our public institutions won’t stand a chance.

You are the lifeblood of our democracy. Please, do not obey in advance.

1. Veterans make up more than 30% of federal civilian employees, compared to about 5% of the civilian employment population, due to requirements to privilege them in hiring. So mass firing policies that protect them would increase their presence in the federal government even more. For all the talk of removing DEI, veterans preference is, by far, the largest form of affirmative action in the federal government, one which no-one seems to want to talk about.