I’ve asked myself how the capitalists have had moderate success forcing people (whose only job is to press buttons on a computer) back into an office. But I guess social control is all it takes
More awful and stupid bullshit. I guess I should be glad he’s being honest though, he’s proposing it not for collaboration or efficiency, but as an end run around employment protections to thin out staff. Love the DC mayor trying to get the govt to force RTO… everyone should suffer a commute so we can have more chain fast-casual eateries, yay!
I should amend my comment to say that even if ramaswamy doesn’t know it, he’s not really being honest though. The federal govt isn’t that inefficient. And his purpose isn’t to make it more efficient; it’s to degrade and destroy federal institution function.
Even the ghoul Larry Summers said attacking payroll is a losing battle, as it accounts for like 15% of the govt ledger, and that ledger is made of fun money to begin with. Sigh.
American politics is just a tower of dunning Kruger shit and pandering to calcified dunning Kruger bullshit.
Its a very particular flavor of shit.
I said it in another thread, but I believe that he's doing this to avoid giving any kind of benefits to federal employees by firing them and rehiring them through "private contractors" that will appear to get whatever little surplus there is to extract by squeezing the fired employees for.
And air pollution! Greenhouse gasses! Mangled bodies and unlivable cities! Fuck yes! More!
Edit: I'm really glad we're at least getting different flavors if fascism. Italian futurism is kind if my fav/least loathed. Glad to see, if we have to have fascism, that this is one of the strains we get. They at least have relatable kinds of fun while ruining everything.
Bowser is basically an appendage of the real estate developers in the area. I believe she endorsed Michael Bloomberg in 2020.
Pulling all the wiring out of the walls, then wondering why none of my buttons and levers do anything.
Can't wait to hear how the department you just decimated isn't functioning properly because of those damn Deep State saboteurs.
It blows my mind how Ramaswamy actually got a position here. Rewarding failure really is the last true bipartisan consensus, isn't it?
Someone mind reposting the article text here? This link doesn't work for me
This link worked for me. It seems the original link may have moved or been removed.
WASHINGTON — Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk's new effort to increase government efficiency could initially target the nearly two-thirds of federal workers who are still approved to work from home 18 months after the pandemic ended.
Vacant federal office space in downtown Washington is costly to maintain and a deep source of frustration to Mayor Muriel Bowser. She told reporters last week that she had requested a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump and that top on her agenda is pushing federal workers to return to downtown Washington.
“How we can make sure that our federal workforce is back to work is one big thing,” Bowser said, adding that she wants a partnership with the federal government to bring “vibrancy back to our town.”
According to the Office of Management and Budget, telework-eligible federal workers are in the office 60% of the time and about 10% of all workers are fully remote. All told, the U.S. has roughly 2.2 million federal workers. After Trump's election victory, Ramaswamy told Tucker Carlson that he wanted to take a “jackhammer and a chain saw” to the federal government, starting by forcing civil servants to return to work.
“They don’t go to work,” he said. “You don’t even have to talk about you’re in a mass firing, a mass exodus. Just tell them they have to come back five days a week from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.”
Ramaswamy predicted that would lead to a “25% thinning out of the federal bureaucracy right there.” Jacqueline Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents more than 700,000 workers, said more than half of federal jobs don’t qualify for working from home. She also argued that Ramaswamy and Musk’s claims are exaggerated.
“This includes all the health care workers at VA hospitals and clinics and corrections officers at the Bureau of Prisons," she told NBC News. "And Border Patrol agents and federal air marshals and people who inspect slaughterhouses and meat processing plants."
With fewer people in the office, the cost of excess federal office space has become a concern. Last year, the Government Accountability Office concluded that 17 of the 24 largest federal agencies used on average only 25% of their office space.
Former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on July 16. Kamil Krzaczynski / AFP - Getty Images For the Education Department, which is at the top of Musk and Ramaswamy’s list for elimination, the use rate was even lower, at 16%.
As of August, 98% of Education Department employees were eligible to work from home and more than half were working remotely, according to the OMB. One of the agencies with the lowest office use rates, only 9%, was the federal government’s human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management.
Simon said allowing some workers to partially work from home helps the federal government recruit and retain a talented workforce that, despite lower pay, has to compete with the private sector.
In August 2023, in a push to get civil servants back in the office, President Joe Biden required all federal workers to spend at least half of every two-week pay period in the office. Ironically, the federal government encouraged working from home long before the coronavirus pandemic. After the 9/11 attack in 2001, President George W. Bush saw it as a way to ensure workers could stay online and work during emergencies.
In 2004, a little over 750,000 federal workers were eligible to work from home. Since then, the figure has nearly doubled to 1.3 million.
Vivek better post a video of him rapping Break Stuff by Limp Bizkit then.
