Remote Work for Civil Servants Faces a Challenge Under Trump

When the Social Security Administration agreed to a five-year extension of work-from-home arrangements for tens of thousands of employees in early December, many at the agency expressed relief.

But the reprieve may be short-lived. At a news conference two weeks later, President-elect Donald J. Trump railed against the deal and said he would go to court to undo it. “If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office,” he said, “they’re going to be dismissed.”

The back-and-forth previewed what is likely to be one of the earliest points of contention of Mr. Trump’s second administration. 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.

In a Wall Street Journal column in November, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the businessmen tapped to lead Mr. Trump’s government efficiency commission, 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.