AFGE Reacts to DOGE Taking Aim at Telework

The newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is taking aim at federal government telework.

The unit’s heads, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have made their anti-telework stance clear in recent months. And they’ve been vocal about DOGE’s intent to bring federal employees back to the office on a full-time basis.

The largest federal employee union is decidedly not on board with that plan, and is firing back at what it says are false claims surrounding how and where government employees are spending their workday.

In a recent statement, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents roughly 800,000 federal government workers, called out lawmakers and members of President-elect Trump’s transition team for “exaggerating use and misuse of telework” in a “demeaning attempt to justify job cuts.”

For example, the union took issue with Musk’s recent assertion that “the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%,” excluding security guards and maintenance personnel.

Not so, AFGE said, pointing to U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) data to refute Musk’s estimate.

Issued in August 2024, an OMB report found that, among federal workers who were eligible for telework, more than half (61%) of their regular working hours were spent working in-person. OMB also determined that federal workers were in the office for 79% of their working hours, excluding fully remote-eligible workers who do not have an in-person worksite.

Republican Senator Joni Ernst has been another frequent critic of public sector telework, describing remote government employees as “bubble bath bureaucrats,” while calling for an investigation of major federal departments and agencies to determine how telework affects the delivery and response times of services, for instance.

Ernst also produced a 2024 report alleging that government agencies’ “service backlogs and delays, unanswered phone calls and emails, and no-show appointments are harming the health, lives, and aspirations of Americans.”

AFGE maintains the opposite is true. The union referenced a November 2024 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report to Congress that determined telework actually increases employee engagement while helping to recruit and retain workers “who provide vital public services to the American people.”

AFGE has conducted its own research regarding telework’s impact on productivity. In March 2023, the union polled 3,100 government employees. Overall, 71% of respondents said that telework had improved productivity at their agency “a great deal” in the time since the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020. All told, 97% reported that working remotely over that time span either improved their organization’s productivity or had no effect on their output.

When asked what factors are contributing to backlogs at federal agencies, just 6% of respondents cited remote work. The largest number (66%) attributed service logjams to understaffing and lack of resources.

Noting that many survey respondents shared fears that rolling back telework options would actually exacerbate agency backlogs, AFGE National President Everett Kelley urged lawmakers to take those concerns seriously.

“These civil servants show up every day to deliver government services to the American people—whether in a physical office or remotely,” Kelley said in a statement issued in March 2023.

“As lawmakers, policymakers and agency leadership discuss the future of telework, the voices and concerns of rank-and-file federal employees deserve to be heard.”