Trump will fight Biden remote work deal; union vows to fight back
President-elect Trump on Monday indicated that he plans to push back on President Biden's move to reach an agreement that would allow tens of thousands of federal workers to remain in a hybrid work arrangement with telework through 2029.
"We're talking about a friendly takeover, a friendly transition as they like to say, this is a friendly transition, and it is," Trump said at a press conference. "But there are two events that took place that I think are very terrible."
"One is that if people don't come back to work, come back into the office, they're going to be dismissed, and somebody in the Biden administration gave a five-year waiver of that. So that for five years, people don't have to come back into the office," Trump said. "It involved 49,000 people for five years. They don't have to go. They just signed this thing. It's ridiculous. So it was like a gift to a union, and we're going to obviously be in court to stop it."
Trump's comments come after a deal was reached earlier this month between the largest federal workers' union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and the Social Security Administration (SSA) that "places current levels of telework into our National Agreement through October 25, 2029."
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The deal, which was first reported by Bloomberg, covers roughly 42,000 Social Security employees around the country. Under the agreement, requirements for workers range from being in office from two to five days per week, the outlet reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
AFGE National President Everett Kelley responded to Trump's comments about the remote work deal in a statement that the union supports telework "where it delivers for both the taxpayers and the workers who serve them. Telework and remote work are tools that have helped the federal government increase productivity and efficiency, maintain continuity of operations, and increase disaster preparedness."
"Rumors of widespread federal telework and remote work are simply untrue. More than half of federal employees cannot telework at all because of the nature of their jobs, only 10% of federal workers are remote, and those who have a hybrid arrangement spend over 60% of working hours in the office," Kelley said.
"Collective bargaining agreements entered into by the federal government are binding and enforceable under the law. We trust the incoming administration will abide by their obligations to honor lawful union contracts. If they fail to do so, we will be prepared to enforce our rights," Kelley added.
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Trump has tasked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will focus on finding ways to cut government spending and improve the efficiency of federal initiatives.
Musk and Ramaswamy have indicated that they want to end remote work and view the requirement that federal workers return to the office as a way of spurring voluntary layoffs.
"Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don't want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn't pay them for the COVID-era privilege of staying home," Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal last month.
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Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, the leader of the Senate's DOGE caucus, said after the deal between AFGE and the SSA was announced that it was "unacceptable" and she'll work with Musk, Ramaswamy and DOGE to "fix this ASAP and get bureaucrats back to work."
FOX Business' Breck Dumas and Sarah Rumpf-Whitten contributed to this report.