The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reportedly discovered that government employees in the Washington, D.C. area are taking to the golf course on Friday afternoons, filling up public courses across the nation’s capital.  The news sparked uproar from conservatives as the Trump administration seeks to rein in the federal government and cut waste.

The popular conservative commentator Amuse wrote on X, “DOGE: There are 40 public golf courses in the Washington DC area. On Fridays the tee sheets are filled with the names of career civil service workers. Does your boss let you ‘work’ from the golf course?”  President Trump also criticized work-from-home protocols within the federal government, stating that it was being abused to play tennis and golf.

“All federal employees must once again show up to work. is a new phenomena. you know, since covid show up to work in person, like the rest of us, it doesn’t work when you don’t show up,” Trump said. “And I see companies now we’re all going back to it, they’re all going back. It’s great. I watch some of the big business leaders saying we absolutely go back, you can’t work at home, they’re not working.”

Calling out government employees for their remote work habits, Trump said, “They’re playing Tennis they’re playing golf or they have other jobs, but they’re not working, or they’re certainly not working hard, you could never build a company or a country with that. So we have a very strong policy and if they don’t show up to work, they get fired.”

The White House released a statement on January 20, just as Trump stepped back into office titled “Return to In-Person Work.”  The statement read, “Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.  This memorandum shall be implemented consistent with applicable law.”

The American Tribune reported late last year on fear among federal workers that President Trump would drag them back into the office and force them to work in-person.  “We’re talking about a friendly takeover, a friendly transition as they like to say, this is a friendly transition, and it is. But there are two events that took place that I think are very terrible,” Trump said at the time.

“One is that if people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed, and somebody in the Biden administration gave a five-year waiver of that. So that for five years, people don’t have to come back into the office,” the president added. “It involved 49,000 people for five years. They don’t have to go. They just signed this thing. It’s ridiculous. So it was like a gift to a union, and we’re going to obviously be in court to stop it.”