According to a George Washington University survey released in February, nearly two-in-three Americans view the government as “totally ineffective” at “getting things done” and, by an even larger margin, believe the government mostly makes decisions for “political reasons” rather than the “public interest.”
Unfortunately, recent actions by the Biden administration to increase the amount of “official time” federal employees spend during the workday serving what is perhaps the president’s favorite special interest — while simultaneously obscuring the public visibility of the associated cost to taxpayers — couldn’t be better calibrated to worsen these dismal trends.
“Official time” gets its name from the 1978 law authorizing the practice but, since it involves federal employees spending some or all of their workday engaging in labor union advocacy while continuing to receive their full, taxpayer-funded salary and benefits, “taxpayer-funded union time” would be a more accurate description.
As part of his effort to tame an out-of-control federal bureaucracy, President Trump issued an executive order in 2018 limiting taxpayer-funded union time to the extent legally possible.
However, President Biden — who promised to lead “the most pro-union administration in American history” — promptly rescinded Trump’s reform on his third day in office.
And he didn’t stop there.
In April 2021, Mr. Biden established a special task force to develop recommendations for increasing unionization. Among other things, the task force’s initial, February 2022 report identified a “suite of strategies” for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to unionize more federal employees.
As an example of how the administration was already pursuing such policies, the report boasted of how Biden had “restored” official time at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The upshot: The more than 400 medical staff Trump had returned to their actual federal jobs could once again spend their workday on union activism rather than caring for the nation’s veterans.
In a March 2023 update, the task force “proudly announced” the unionization of 80,000 more federal employees, purportedly due to the administration’s pro-union strategies.
And earlier this month, Biden issued still another order directing federal agencies to establish “labor-management forums” at which agency leaders will engage in “pre-decisional” consultation with union officials over “workplace matters” and discuss how to “promote satisfactory labor relations.”
Eased restrictions, more unionized federal workers, and added labor relations busywork are a recipe for a spike in the amount of on-the-clock union work by federal employees, which could explain OPM’s recent efforts to obscure official time’s visibility to the public.
In November, the Freedom Foundation reported that OPM had taken down a page on its website explaining official time and housing a series of OPM reports estimating the amount and costs of official time dating back to the Clinton administration.
Since its first 1998 report, OPM has typically released updated estimates of official time use every year or so, a practice that continued unabated through the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations.
Under Biden, however, OPM has failed to release a single official time report.
In response to an inquiry led by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), OPM director Kiran Ahuja recently acknowledged her agency had no intention of restoring the official time webpage it deep-sixed last summer, much less conduct another study on the costs of taxpayer-funded union time.
Ahuja did, however, admit that the last such report — covering fiscal year 2019 — showed nearly a 30 percent decline in official time use, a testament to Trump’s now-reversed reforms. Even still, federal bureaucrats spent an estimated 2.6 million hours on taxpayer-funded union time that year at a cost of about $135 million.
As far back as 1979, the Government Accountability Office noted the difficulty of accurately measuring official time given federal agencies “widespread failure” to keep adequate records. The periodic OPM estimates of recent decades were better than nothing but, with the politicized agency now stonewalling, a more durable solution is needed.
According to the GWU survey, more transparency is Americans’ top recommendation for increasing trust in government, so, if government quietly aiding a favored special interest group at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars is the problem, then sunlight is at least the first step towards a solution.
To that end, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Rep. Scott Franklin (R-Fla.), just introduced the Taxpayer-Funded Union Time Transparency Act, which would require each federal agency to track and annually report the amount of time its employees spend on union business and the cost of such official time to taxpayers.
Love government unions or hate them, taxpayers at least deserve to know how much union work is being done on their tab.
Maxford Nelsen is director of research and government affairs at the Freedom Foundation and senior fellow at the Institute for the American Worker.