(Daily Wire) The federal government pays more than $100 million a year to employees who aren’t doing their actual government jobs, but rather working for unions representing government employees against management — with taxpayers essentially funding both sides of the bargaining table.
For decades, the government has tracked and reported those figures, but the Biden administration has removed the reports.
Under the policy known as “official time,” hundreds of nominal government employees haven’t done anything but full-time union work in years, yet remain on the federal payroll. Not only is the policy expensive to taxpayers, but it also props up the power of unions by subsidizing their activities, giving them resources even if employees don’t support them enough to pay dues. Those unions fight against the firing of employees accused of misconduct, and advocate for policies that sometimes pit the interests of employees over the interests of taxpayers, such as resisting a return to in-person work.
The Office of Personnel Management has historically kept track of and published how the program is being used, including during the Obama administration. But the data has not been updated since 2019 — when the government shelled out for 2.6 million hours, or nearly 300 years’ worth, of employee time that was actually spent on union business.
The Biden administration has even been secretive about its secrecy. In December, The Daily Wire asked OPM why the page listing the reports was missing, along with all historical reports except 2019, which can only be located via the search function. A spokesperson said, “Previous reports on official time are not currently available because OPM is reorganizing our website to improve navigation and customer experience.”
But months later, they remain gone. OPM refused to answer the question of whether OPM was still collecting the statistics, why it hasn’t published reports for the years since 2019, and whether The Daily Wire could review those reports even if they aren’t housed online.
A report by the Freedom Foundation questioned the accuracy of OPM’s explanation, saying that the factual information detailing how taxpayer money was spent was taken down around July 2023, the same month that OPM added a “Worker Empowerment” page boasting that the administration supports “policies, practices, and programs that promote worker power, worker organizing, and collective bargaining.”
The think tank said there is a difference between supporting unions and hiding public data in service of an agenda. “Despite differing views on the policy’s merits, recent presidential administrations of both parties have made regular attempts to at least measure the use of official time across the federal workforce,” it said.
