One of President Donald Trump’s first actions upon entering the White House was to order federal employees to return to the office.
The government workforce, he has repeatedly contended, could not be productive from home.
“I happen to be a believer that you have to go to work. I don’t think you can work from home,” Trump said on Feb. 11. “Nobody’s going to work from home, they’re going to be going out, they’re going to play tennis, they’re going to play golf. They’re going to do a lot of things. They’re not working.”
Three days later, Trump traveled to his sprawling Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, where he remained for parts of six consecutive days, according to an NBC News tracker. On one of the days, Trump signed two executive orders and a memorandum. He also held an impromptu press conference.
In other words, he worked from home.
That weekend, he did what he accused federal workers of doing: He went golfing. Between Feb. 14 and Feb. 19, he golfed on four different days. While he is far from the first president to do so, each golfing trip is a cost to taxpayers.
Before that, Trump hosted Republican senators at Mar-a-Lago in early February, where he delivered remarks including an update on his administration’s cost-cutting efforts.
Some federal workers said Trump’s frequent trips to his luxury estate in Florida — racking up millions of dollars in security and transportation costs — while ordering millions of government employees back to the office, reeked of hypocrisy.
“It’s clear and should be to the rest of Americans that it’s never about ‘the rule,’ it’s about who’s making the rules,” said a federal employee with the Department of Education who is also a disabled veteran. “This all fits in so perfectly to the power dynamics installed by this administration — a dynamic where Trump does what he wants, to who he wants, without repercussions.”
“The return-to-office mandate was never about effectiveness, collaboration or cohesion,” the employee added. “It was always about federal employees being ‘traumatically affected,’ as Russell Vought put it.”
The White House did not return a request for comment.
Vought was a principal author of Project 2025, which came up frequently in the 2024 presidential election. Among the many tenets in the vast conservative governing blueprint is a call to significantly shrink the workforce and expand presidential power, both of which are playing out as central thrusts of the Trump administration so far. Trump has empowered billionaire Elon Musk, his biggest donor who is also a defense contractor, to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to root out what it deems wasteful and unnecessary spending.
Trump and Musk have said the federal government is bloated, and the administration has slashed tens of thousands of federal jobs already. Meanwhile, Trump’s agenda would add trillions of dollars to the federal debt, budget experts say.
At the same time, Trump has hit the links 14 times to date in his second term, with a potential for more rounds expected in the immediate future. Just since January, the cost of Trump’s golf weekends to taxpayers is more than $18 million, according to one analysis.
Trump has spent five of his seven weekends as president at Mar-a-Lago, and during a sixth, he overnighted at another Trump property in Miami. This Friday, according to a Federal Aviation Administration notice, the president was back at Mar-a-Lago, where he’s expected to remain until Sunday evening. His motorcade was heading to his golf club Saturday afternoon. That would then be the seventh of eight weekends that he would spend entirely or partly away from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
At the same time, since his Jan. 20 inauguration, Trump and Musk have regularly denigrated the federal workforce as lazy and emblematic of waste and fraud.
“I feel very badly, but many of them don’t work at all,” Trump said of fired federal workers on Wednesday while providing no basis for those comments. “Many of them never showed up to work. That’s not good.”
A report compiled by the White House budget office said that as of May 2024, 54% of the 2.28 million-strong civilian federal workforce worked in person, while 46.4% were eligible to work remotely. The report said 10% of civilian personnel actually worked in remote-only positions.
One Health and Human Services employee panned Trump’s comments as false and argued that critics of federal workers don’t realize that