Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy Call for Five-Day Workweeks for Federal Employees

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-leaders of what President-elect Donald J. Trump has called the Department of Government Efficiency, said on Wednesday that they supported requiring federal employees to work from the office five days a week as part of a broad overhaul of the civil service.

The change, they wrote in an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal, could 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.

In their column, Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy described some of the early aims of the department, which Mr. Trump had said would operate outside of the government and offer input to federal officials. Mr. Musk has promised to eliminate $2 trillion from the annual United States budget, and has said that the government needs only 99 agencies, not more than 400.

Part of the group’s task — cutting down the number of federal regulations — would be providing “sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy wrote.

The two men have been advising Mr. Trump’s transition team to hire what they said were “small-government crusaders” to work with the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.