Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy appeared on Fox News on Monday to back up Elon Musk’s extreme attack on workers’ rights.
“If you can't come up with five things that you did, you know, maybe you shouldn't be employed here,” the former star of MTV’s “Real World” said on Fox News.
Much of Trump’s Cabinet has spent the past 24 hours trying to clean up Musk’s chaotic email demanding that all 2.3 million federal workers justify their jobs. But Duffy took the opportunity to criticize the entire federal workforce, including a dangerously understaffed Federal Aviation Administration, which has been under scrutiny over several high-profile airplane crashes recently and which technically reports to him.
“I think this whole movement … is potentially going to make people go, ‘I'm going to come to work earlier. I'm going to stay later. I'm going to look at what Donald Trump wants me to accomplish because he won the election, and I'm going to fight and work to make sure I help him accomplish that because I'm a public servant. I don't work for a party or a union or a think tank. I actually work for the president.’”
Following multiple deadly airplane crashes, which Duffy blamed on former President Joe Biden and workplace diversity initiatives, the FAA reportedly fired hundreds of employees.
The American right has lately engaged in a misinformation campaign, falsely claiming that the federal workforce is made up of freeloading bureaucrats. For example, Republicans and Musk pushed a wildly unscientific survey that suggested only 6% of the federal workforce has returned to working full-time in the office (rather than remotely). However, ProPublica found that more than 50% of the federal workforce had returned to working full-time in their office, with hybrid remote workers spending around 60% of their time at federal offices.
A Washington Post analysis also shows that federal employees work longer hours than all but the military personnel and those self-employed, and they take less time off than most other groups as well. The share of federal workers who put in at least 40 hours in a typical week is significantly higher than employees in the private sector.
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