Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk's partner on the DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency 18-month project, is known as an innovator, a disruptor, a loopy Silicon Valley visionary, a little manic and crazy. There are a lot of them like that over there.

Well, now that he's at President Trump's DOGE, he has come up with his wildest idea ever:

Making the federal workforce actually show up for work.

You know, like the private sector does.

According to the New York Post:

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on Wednesday floated ending work-from-home privileges for federal employees as part of their effort to trim the size of government. 

The two entrepreneurs, tasked by President-elect Donald Trump last week to lead the newly formed “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), suggested in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that eliminating remote work would result in mass resignations that would help them achieve their goal of a smaller, more efficient, government.  

“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote.  

“If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” they added.

The problem has gotten bad.

According to a Daily Caller investigation last year, huge federal buildings on weekdays stood with empty parking lots, with the Department of Health and Human Services being one of the worst of them. At a congressional hearing at the time, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana that he had no idea how many of the employees he supervises actually show up to work.

I wrote this about it at the time:

Cassidy flashed his big photo of a gargantuan empty parking lot of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services headquarters, taken at 10:40 a.m. on a weekday, and said there were other empty parking lots at HHS, too. He asked how many employees getting cost-of-living increases were at their desks working at all, Becerra evaded the question, claiming that the employees were all performing well. but it became pretty obvious that virtually none of them were showing up to work. Not the CDC, which is one of the regulated agencies which must have representation at that agency. Not the FDA, which is another. Not the National Institutes for Health, which is yet another. There are 11 of them.

As for what production they were producing, Becerra didn't have much to say on that, either. Cassidy asked for VPN data proving the employees were working and Becerra deferred on that, too.

...

What the heck do they do over there and why aren't they going back to the office? We know that many allied groups, such as teachers, rebelled mightily at having to re-enter the classroom as COVID subsided, preferring that bunny-slipper commute and those Zoom classrooms to the actual work of going to school and teaching children.

 Would federal agencies really be any different? The claim that they are performing normally and optimally is questionable, given the experience with the teachers and for that matter, the private sector, so Becerra was claiming that government workers were somehow different.

More likely, they don't do anything at all at their offices and one can just as easily do nothing at home and take an inflated beltway paycheck as do nothing at the office.

While there is a place for remote work in the workplace, we do know that many companies, even the most tecchie-modern of tech companies, such as Yahoo! found that huge numbers of remote workers tended to be less productive than workers at a single workplace where ideas are exchanged and workers can immediately interact with one another. Company brass there insisted that workers return to the office amid many protests.

We also know that huge numbers of workers can be laid off with no ill effects whatsoever, as was done by Musk at Twitter, laying off 80% of his workforce -- with nobody able to tell the difference among Twitter's users -- if anything, the product improved, and now the company has now begun to turn a profit.

On Becerra and his agency, I noted:

That Becerra doesn't know how many show up to work, and hasn't bothered to bring them back to work because everything is the same either way, highlights that he's probably as lazy and unproductive as the rest of them, another Pete Buttigieg living his best life, or is a hands-off manager who doesn't know what's going on with the 11 agencies he manages.

We do have the naysayers, though, such as leftist Fox News opinion columnist Gleb Tsipursky, who has got the full Henny Penny thing going:

Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has argued that mandating in-office attendance could encourage voluntary departures among federal workers, potentially reducing what he sees as bureaucratic inefficiencies. In an interview, he described his proposal as a way to address what he characterized as a bloated federal bureaucracy.

While this plan is bold and disruptive, it also poses significant risks that merit careful consideration by the administration.

Federal employees are responsible for managing a $6.1 trillion budget, with payroll costs totaling $110 billion annually, representing just 1.8% of the total budget. Ramaswamy believes a return-to-office mandate would lead to about 550,000 resignations, potentially saving $27.5 billion annually.

Federal employees are responsible for managing a $6.1 trillion budget, with payroll costs totaling $110 billion annually, representing just 1.8% of the total budget. Ramaswamy believes a return-to-office mandate would lead to about 550,000 resignations, potentially saving $27.5 billion annually.

He claims that federal wages are insignificant to the broader budget, institutional knowledge could be destroyed as bureaucrats are laid off, retraining costs would be costly, and government services would plummet.

Color me skeptical on every one of those claims. The size of government has expanded exponentially in the Biden years, yet somehow the country managed to survive in the years before that great expansion. How did we ever manage?

He adds that tech upgrades would be better, but I have news for him: Musk and Ramaswamy are already on it. They aren't going "either-or." They are DOGE and they mean business.

All in all, Ramaswamy's idea is a wild one all right, but only to bloated bureaucrats who take six-hour lunches, hire all their relatives, don't even bother to show up for work, and claim that life as a privileged princeling for them is the only thing that can 'save' the country.

It tells you how far the country's fallen that a proposal to end no-show jobs, forcing six-figure bureaucrats to bother to get out of bed, put on clean pants, and get to the office on time, a practice long enacted in the private sector, which is forced to produce results, in Washington could actually be viewed as radical.

That Vivek is a wild man, isn't he?

Image: Screen shot from New York Post video, via YouTube