Elon Musk said what many officials think: RTO authorities are designed to make you quit.

Writing on The Wall Street Journal This week, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—who were recently appointed to lead the newly created Department of Labor—touched on a topic that continues to be a source of contention in workplaces across America.

In their op-ed, Musk and Ramaswamy offered insight into how the new system, known as DOGE, could cut costs and reduce the size of the federal government. They outlined their plans to reduce the number of civil servants—in part by ordering civil servants to return to the office full time. “Requiring government workers to come to the office five days a week would lead to voluntary layoffs that we accept: If government workers don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for their Covid-era privilege.” staying at home,” they wrote.

A report released by the Office of Management and Budget earlier this year revealed that civil servants eligible to receive calls were spending more than 60% of their time working in the office. Still, the policy change that Musk and Ramaswamy are advocating could affect more than a million workers — nearly half of the entire corporate workforce — who are currently unable to work from home at least part of the time.

These DOGE plans fit well with Musk’s way of managing his companies. When Musk bought the company then known as Twitter, he banned remote work and began layoffs, cutting something like 80% of the workforce. By 2022, he told Tesla and SpaceX employees they need to spend at least 40 hours in the office a week. Musk has even described remote work as “morally wrong” because some workers don’t have the option to work from home. (“People have to get off their moral high horse about the bull coming out of the house,” he told CNBC last year.)

In describing hybrid work as “the right of the Covid era,” Musk and Ramaswamy echoed what many leaders have suggested as they impose stricter requirements to return to office. As they saw higher productivity rates during the crisis – and in the years since – many companies have insisted that five days a week in the office is essential to promote collaboration, despite the postponement of employees who are used to hybrid schedules or are hired as remote workers. When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy ordered workers to return to the office full time, he noted that “before this pandemic, it was not a given that people could work remotely two days a week, and that will be true moving forward.”

Some back-to-office policies appeared to be designed to increase attrition and encourage voluntary resignations—and C-suite executives admitted they expected profits after rolling out those mandates. In response to employee complaints about Amazon’s new policy, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said that people who were unhappy should leave the company, according to the report. Reuters report. “If there are people who don’t work well in that area and don’t want to, that’s fine, there are other companies,” he said. But few leaders have been as outspoken as Musk and Ramaswamy about their intention to return to work – and they hope the new policy will help reduce the number of people.

In fact, the idea that strict office requirements will lead some public workers to quit—just like their counterparts in the private sector—seems to be a central part of their proposals to shrink the federal government. If business instructions are any measure of how people feel about remote work, it is likely that this strategy will be effective.