Federal Employee Unions Are Trying to Block Trump’s Agenda

In early December, the American Federation of Government Employees finalized a five-year contract with the Social Security Administration, preserving the right to a minimum of only two days in the office per week for its 42,000 federal employees. 

Other federal employees’ unions representing workers at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and the Bureau of Land Management, among others, are reportedly working to finalize contracts that would preserve federal employees’ rights to report to the office a minimum of only two days per pay period. 

These provisions are meant to resist Trump’s plans to require federal employees to report to the office five days a week or else be dismissed. The Trump administration will likely challenge these contract provisions.  

To make matters worse, those throwing wrenches in the works are federal employees who are being paid by taxpayers to work for their unions instead of doing the jobs they were hired to perform. 

This practice of federal employees being “released” from their duties to instead work for their federal employee unions is known as “official time.” In his first term, Trump limited this practice so that federal employees could spend no more than 25% of their paid time working for their union. However, on just his third day in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order restoring federal employees’ ability to spend up to 100% of their time working for their union.  

This presumably means that many federal workers, including some nurses at the Veterans Administration, are back to spending 100% of their time working for their union instead of the jobs they were hired for, such as treating patients.

I say presumably because while recent administrations — Democratic and Republican alike — kept track of and reported on federal employees’ use of official time, the Biden administration removed the Office of Personnel Management’s webpage on official time.

So we now have no idea how many federal employees are working for their unions, how much total time they’re using, or how much it’s costing taxpayers. However, it’s probably safe to say that it’s more than the 3.6 million hours federal employees spent during the last year of the Obama administration in 2016. That 3.6 million hours is close to 2,000 full-time federal employees, and multiplied by the average federal employee salary of $106,000 and another $56,500 in benefits, the 2016 level of official time would translate into over $321 million per year today. The actual figure is almost certainly much higher and undoubtedly exceeded a billion dollars over the Biden administration’s four years.

It’s bad enough that taxpayers are forced to pay federal employees for time spent not doing their jobs. It’s even worse that taxpayers are forced to pay federal employees to negotiate for things that directly contradict taxpayers’ interests, such as collective telework entitlements that reduce the quality of government services and procedures that shield recalcitrant and destructive federal employees from disciplinary actions.

The No Union Time on the Taxpayer’s Dime Act, which was introduced by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and former Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC), would end the practice of official time. While that wouldn’t preclude federal employees’ unions from thwarting incoming administrations and driving up taxpayer costs, it would certainly make it harder for them by requiring federal employees’ unions to fund their own payrolls. 

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Rachel Greszler is a Visiting Fellow in Workforce at the Economic Policy Innovation Center.