How Trump Unmade a Planned Five-Year Extension of Hybrid Work
Just another mokey wrench in the works.
Posting this in December 2025 for record keeping, when I should have posted in January 2025, when it was topical.
Noam Scheiber reported on how the Social Security Administration seems likely to renege on a planned five-year extension of an existing hybrid work scheme under Trump.
Over the past few years, many federal workers have organized their lives around hybrid arrangements that help them juggle work and family responsibilities, and have gone so far as to demand that the Biden administration preserve the status quo. Some have rushed to join the roughly one-quarter to one-third of federal workers who are unionized, so that telework policies will be negotiable.
[…]
But to the president-elect and his allies, the work-from-home arrangements are not only a glaring example of liberal permissiveness run amok — “a gift to a union,” Mr. Trump said — but also a tantalizing opportunity to clear the federal government of obstructionist workers and to vastly shrink its reach.
I wonder if he even mentions the climate impacts of commuting? No.
The usual bullshit:
in November, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy […] said they would welcome “a wave of voluntary terminations” triggered by forcing federal employees to work from an office five days a week. Many private-sector employers have recently announced such policies, arguing that in-person work improves communication, mentoring and collaboration.’ But the evidence is ambiguous, and RTO comes with great costs to the workers and the environment.
Even Biden pushed to get federal workers back in the office: why? This implies it was just politics, a response to GOP gibes.
In 2023, after the Justice Department indicated that it would soon require employees to spend two or three days in the office a week on average, up from one, a group of department lawyers wrote to their leadership saying the shift would be self-defeating.
[…]
Several said they had effectively split the work-from-home dividend between themselves and the government: They did more work, but also spent more time tending to children and their mental health. The testimonials align with a survey in mid-2020 by the Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom and two colleagues, who found that the typical office worker saved about 80 minutes a day when working from home, about 40 percent of which was used to do more work. A recent Labor Department study found that industries with higher rates of remote work had larger increases in productivity.
Obviously, all these heads are in the sway of productivity theater instead of real productivity, and they don’t give a shit about the costs to their staff.
Lawyers in the Justice Department divisions that focus on civil rights and the environment sought to unionize last year to help preserve their remote-work arrangements and to protect themselves in case Mr. Trump follows through on his declared intention to revive an executive order that would make it easier to fire civil servants. The civil rights lawyers had to overcome opposition from their leadership, which initially argued that department lawyers were unable to form a union because of restrictions on workers involved in national security matters, according to Bloomberg Law. They voted last week to unionize.
[…]
Hundreds of employees at the Federal Trade Commission voted in September to unionize, partly because they hoped to protect their work-from-home arrangements under future administrations. But after quickly recognizing the union, the agency’s chair, Lina Khan, let months pass before engaging with it, according to a labor source familiar with the negotiation. Contract negotiations began in earnest only this week, according to the source, amid pressure from labor leaders and friendly politicians.
Assholes, Democrats and Republicans, both.