Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy recently proposed requiring all federal workers to work in-person five days a week. They said they welcome the “wave of voluntary terminations” this would cause since they apparently believe people only use telework to evade working. Yet telework has real advantages, and these advantages benefit parents most.
When people take a job, they consider a number of factors in addition to the pay and actual job requirements. People also think through logistics such as, “How close could I live to the job given housing prices? Given a potentially long-commute, how many days could I telework so as not to spend hours in a car or train away from my children? How much time will I need to put the kids in day care?”
In D.C., such questions are preeminent.
While the federal bureaucracy may indeed be sprawling, D.C. itself is not—it’s less than 70 square miles. Housing prices are accordingly high. The median house in D.C. is worth $705,000. In Manassas, a Virginian suburb about an hour and half outside D.C., it’s $393,900.
As a result, many people who work in D.C. don’t live there; they live in Virginia, Maryland, or West Virginia. They have the commutes to prove it. In 2019, over 70% of people who worked in D.C. spent 30-90 minutes getting to work, or between one to three hours each day commuting. Teleworking three days a week means a reprieve from commuting 3 to 9 hours each week.
The people with long commutes who benefit most from telework tend to be married parents. People who live in D.C. itself are disproportionately unmarried, childless, young adults. While 46% of U.S. households are opposite-sex married-couple households, only 23% of D.C. households are the same. D.C. also has the lowest fertility rate in the nation; the total fertility rate in D.C. in 2022 was 1.24 (the national average was 1.66). Almost a quarter (23%) of D.C. residents are between the ages of 25 and 34.
Some of these demographic differences may be because people who work in D.C. have different marriage and fertility behaviors than the rest of the country, but most of it is because when young people who work in the beltway fall in love, marry, and start a family, they leave D.C. and move to the suburbs. Even though they work in D.C., their family life occurs outside the beltway.
If Elon Musk wants a government that will make sensible family policies, he may want to consider retaining parents in government positions rather than driving them out.
If Musk and Ramaswamy require federal workers to work in-person five days a week, this will disproportionately hurt people with families. Some will eat the extra commuting time and spend less time with their kids. Others will move their family closer to downtown at the expense of having a yard where their children can run and play outside. Others will weigh their job against these new costs to their family-life and choose their family-life instead.
A few federal workers have fully remote jobs.1 These people often purposefully chose a fully remote job to accommodate a spouse’s job in another state, or to live near an elderly parent. Research has confirmed the intuitively family-friendly effects of remote work. Remote workers are more likely to get married and to intend to have more children. Many of these fully remote federal workers will change jobs before uprooting their families to D.C.
Many federal workers do not ascribe to workism. Their job is not their source of identity; it’s simply a job. Removing family-friendly policies like telework will push the least careerist Americans out of federal jobs first.
Federal jobs are diverse, and for some roles, the benefits of in-person work outweigh the costs of excluding some parents. But using in-person work as a crude tool to push people out of federal jobs will guarantee that married people and parents leave first. Whatever the ultimate number of federal workers should be, indiscriminately requiring in-person work will disproportionately leave the remaining jobs to the single and childless.
Elon Musk has previously paid lip-service to pro-natalism, and they say personnel is policy. If Musk wants a government that will make sensible family policies, he may want to consider retaining parents in government positions rather than driving them out.
Anne Morse-Huércanos holds a PhD in Demography and Sociology.
1. Remote federal workers also do not receive the D.C. locality pay, which is an additional 33% of the base federal pay.