What's the value of face-to-face meetings, water cooler conversations, and easily observed productivity? It's nearly 2025 and the return to office debate is still raging.

While President-elect Donald Trump plans his return to the Oval Office, the leaders of his newly proposedDepartment of Government Efficiency are telling federal workers to return to their own. Tapped to lead the Department, also known as DOGE, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out plans in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece for large-scale firings, cuts to government spending, and an end to remote work for federal employees. 

In the piece, the pair addressed arguments that civil service protections could prevent Trump's second administration from trimming the amount of people on the government's payroll. They cited a statute allowing the president to prescribe “reductions in force” so long as he does not target specific employees.

Musk and Ramaswamy are hoping a broad return to office mandate could be another way too thin out the federal work force as employees have shown they will quit over such requirements.

“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,” they wrote.

More:Are remote workers really working all day? Here's what they're doing instead

Most federal employees already do work in person. The Office of Management and Budget reported in August that of 2.28 million federal workers, 46% were telework-eligible of which 10% were fully remote with no expectation to regularly go into the office. At 54%, more than half who could work from home worked fully on-site, according to the report which examined work habits in April and May. 

A return to office mandate would least likely affect workers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where the largest portion — 81% — of telework-eligible employees already work in person. The policy would hit the U.S. Department of the Treasury harder where the smallest portion — 35.7% — of telework-eligible employees make it into the office on a regular basis.

The work from home versus return to office debate started as early as the first COVID vaccines were administered. During the pandemic, the number of Americans primarily working from home tripled from 5.7% in 2019 to 17.9% in 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Its survey found the highest percentage of home-based employees during that time were in the nation's capital, where nearly half worked remotely.

As the height of the pandemic fades further into the distance, the overall percentage of remote workers across the country has decreased slightly. In 2023, Pew Research Center reported 14% of Americans were working from home all the time.

While some companies demand employees return to office, others are compromising with hybrid models and investing in work-from-home technology.

Reach Rachel Barber at [email protected] and follow her on X @rachelbarber_