US Capitol West Side by Martin Falbisoner is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Last week, the Institute for the American Worker (I4AW) released a report demonstrating the degree to which taxpayer dollars are spent by federal government employees on collective bargaining purposes. The report was entitled “Transparency Needed in the Process of Federal Collective Bargaining” and was compiled by Molly E. Conway, founder and principal of Conway Capitol Consulting. According to the report, a Trump administration executive order which directed the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to keep track of “official time” spent by federal bureaucrats on union-related activities during work hours has fallen by the wayside under the Biden administration.

After the last official report was compiled in 2019, the OPM stopped reporting the hours and costs involved in union-related “official time” despite repeated calls from House Education and Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx for President Trump’s 2018 Executive Order to be honored. Pushback continued in 2023 when Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) directed a letter to the OPM querying why the website reporting page went missing in July of that year, only to be told the site was undergoing “maintenance”. In March of last year, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) introduced legislation entitled the Taxpayer-Funded Union Time Transparency Act which called on a return to reporting on the part of the OPM regarding time spent on collective bargaining. In August, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced a bill entitled the No Union Time on the Taxpayer’s Dime Act to curtail union activities by federal employees during work hours. All these attempts to increase transparency for taxpayers were roadblocked by Democrats in Congress and even now, the site still has not re-emerged – making I4AW’s report even more critical.

The last point of reference on official time came from the 2019 financial year which found that non-postal service federal employees spent some 2.6 million hours on union activities, totaling an eye-watering $135 million federal taxpayer dollars. In the interests of transparency for taxpayers, I4AW sent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to 28 federal agencies demanding information on the cost of collective bargaining for the 2022 and 2023 financial years. The results were mixed.

A total of twelve agencies reported some form of employee hours spent on collective bargaining or additional costs associated with official time. Eight of these agencies professed to have “no records” detailing such information, despite seven of those eight agencies submitting to the official OPM report from the 2019 financial year. Here were some of the key findings:

  • The Social Security Administration (SSA) spent 218,098 hours on official time in the 2022 financial year, up from 209,542 in the 2019 financial year – costing taxpayers an additional $2.06 million.
  • The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) spent 7,787 and 9,120 in the 2023 and 2022 financial years respectively, up from 7,485 in the 2019 financial year.
  • The Department of Justice (DOJ) reported 249,836 hours on official time in the 2022 financial year, up a staggering 21,291 hours from the 2019 financial year.
  • The Small Business Administration (SBA) also saw an increase of 330 hours of official time from the 2019 financial year from its 2023 report.
  • The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission also saw a $70,000 hike in taxpayer dollars spent on official time between the 2019 and 2022 financial years.
  • The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) more than tripled its amount spent on official time from 2016 to 2023, going from $144,572 to $537,289.

Six agencies reported some kind of increase either in hours or dollars from the previous two reporting years. Concerningly, only half of the agencies surveyed made it mandatory for employees to list collective bargaining activity on their timesheets, despite all these agencies complying with this standard back in the reference year.

Worse still, mere reports of time and money expended on official time does not fully capture the cost of collective bargaining for federal bureaucrats. As the report highlights, the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem, Virginia, gifted a government union a 5,000 square foot office – encompassing half of an entire hospital wing, fitted with conference rooms, a kitchen and an outdoor patio. In 2019, it was estimated these often overlooked “gifts” totaled $28.35 million. The results of I4AW’s FOIA request for this key agency expense were even more dire. Most agencies claimed to not keep records on the fair market value of office space and utilities. Those who did include the information reported million of dollars in additional costs to taxpayers:

  • The Government Services Agency (GSA) spent $868,587 in the 2022 and 2023 financial years.
  • The Department of Transportation (DOT) spent $182,975 in the 2022 and 2023 financial years and a further $114,000 in travel-related expenses.
  • The Social Security Administration (SSA) spent $300,000 in the 2022 financial year alone on office space and supplies used in collective bargaining.
  • The Department of Labor (DOL) spent nearly $1.1 million in travel-related expenses in the 2022 and 2023 financial years.

Clearly, this is a problem that has not subsided and, in most cases, has worsened under a Biden administration that will leave a legacy of secrecy and little transparency when it comes to safeguarding taxpayer dollars in a cost-of-living crisis. The truth is that taxpayers will not know the scale to which their tax dollars are being abused until the Trump-era mandatory reporting standards are reinstated. The results of the 2024 presidential election were a repudiation of Biden’s “most pro-union administration in American history,” in favor of one that sides with actual workers, as opposed to union bosses. Congress has every right to demand oversight over the expenses of the executive branch, especially when taxpayer dollars are funneled to union bureaucrats that are working in the interests of themselves and not the American people.

Read the full report HERE.