Elon Musk pledges to fire civil servants who work from home
21 November 2024, 17:40
Elon Musk has unveiled plans to sack federal employees who work from home as part of his crusade to slash US government spending.
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Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy were named co-chiefs of the newly-formed Department of Government Effeicney (DOGE) in the wake of Donald Trump’s election win.
Together, the pair have pledged to cut a whopping $2 trillion from federal spending.
And one way they plan to do so, is to fire any civil servant who wants to work from home.
“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 Vivek said.
“With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Doge has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government,” the men added.
Musk was one of the key figures in Trump’s election win, with the world’s richest man spending $200 million to get the Republican elected.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy, who are both unelected themselves, hit out at “millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies” who “view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections”.
They promised “mass headcount reductions across the federal bureaucracy” in a bid to cut spending.
The unelected pair continued: “Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government.
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“That isn’t how America functions today. Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but ‘rules and regulations’ promulgated by un-elected bureaucrats — tens of thousands of them each year.”
Announcing the formulation of DOGE, Trump said it had the potential to “be the Manhattan Project of our times.”
“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies — essential to the ‘Save America’ movement,” Trump said.
