Taxpayers Spent $207 Million to Pay Bureaucrats to Work for Unions in Biden’s Final Year

Taxpayers spent $207 million to pay federal government employees not for their official government jobs but for hours worked for unions in the 2024 fiscal year, President Joe Biden’sfinal year in office.

According to data exclusively provided first to The Daily Signal, federal employees worked 3.2 million hours for unions in 2024. For federal employees who spent some time working for unions, this represented 11.25% of their overall work time.

Federal employees can bill the taxpayer for working with unions by negotiating contracts, resolving disputes, or doing other work for the union. The Office of Personnel Management tracks how many hours employees bill the taxpayer for union work, and the OPM under President Donald Trump issued a March memo demanding the data.

“During the Biden administration, federal agencies spent millions bargaining sweetheart collective-bargaining agreements that imposed significant costs on the American taxpayer while impeding effective and efficient agency operations,” acting OPM Director Charles Ezell wrote in the memo. “Agencies paid for both the costs of their and their unions’ bargaining teams.”

Under Biden, the OPM had not released any data on taxpayer-funded union time, so this report represents the most recent update since the Trump OPM published fiscal year 2019 figures in October 2020.

The fiscal year 2024 (Oct. 1, 2023-Sept. 30, 2024) total of 3.2 million hours represents an increase over the 2019 figure of 2.6 million hours, but a decrease from the 2016 figure of 3.6 million hours. Even so, the 2024 cost to taxpayers ($207 million) exceeded the costs in 2019 ($135 million) and 2016 ($177 million).

In addition to payroll costs, the government also provides property, such as space and equipment, to unions, and pays expenses related to union time, such as travel, per diem, and equipment. In fiscal year 2024, the government provided $29 million worth of property to unions, an increase from the 2019 figure of $25 million. It also paid $2.5 million in 2024 expenses, a decrease from the $3.5 million in 2019.

The Worst Offenders

Some agencies cost taxpayers more than others. Bureaucrats in the Department of Veterans Affairs billed taxpayers $40 million for working 746,381 hours for unions, while those in the Department of Homeland Security charged $34 million for working 557,851 hours for unions, and those in the Defense Department charged $25 million for 432,843 union hours. (The VA announced this week that it would sever ties with unions.)

Under Biden, the Office of Personnel Management billed the taxpayer $308,715 for 4,512 union hours.

Some agencies did not provide data for fiscal year 2024, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development. Secretary of State Marco Rubio closed USAID earlier this year, transferring its functions to the State Department. OPM did not clarify whether State included USAID totals in its 2024 report. USAID stood out in the 2019 report, because taxpayer-funded union time accounted for 50.1% of relevant employees’ overall work time that year.

Only relevant State Department employees spent a higher proportion of their time doing work for unions in 2019, at 82%.

What Kind of Work?

OPM divides taxpayer-funded union time into four categories:

• Term Negotiations: Time union representatives use to prepare for and negotiate a basic collective bargaining agreement.

• Mid-Term Negotiations: The time union representatives use to bargain over issues raised during the life of a term agreement.

• Dispute Resolution: The time used to file and process grievances up to and including arbitrations and to process appeals of bargaining unit employees to the Federal Labor Relations Authority or to the courts.

• General Labor-Management Relations: The time used for activities not included in the previous three categories.

In fiscal year 2024, federal agencies paid for 195,000 hours of term negotiations, 62,000 hours of mid-term negotiations, 400,000 hours of dispute resolution, and 2.5 million hours of general labor-management relations. The broader category accounted for more than 78% of all taxpayer-funded union time.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal government union, has filed at least nine lawsuits against the Trump administration, and bureaucrats may have used taxpayer-funded union time to help those efforts. Other unions that represent federal employees have also funded left-wing activist groups that are suing the administration.

Why Taxpayer-Funded Union Time?

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal established much of the current federal administrative state, opposed unions in the federal government because he found the idea of public servants striking for more taxpayer-funded wages perverse. Yet later presidents allowed bureaucrats to unionize, and in compensation for giving up the right to strike, the government allowed unions certain benefits, such as taxpayer-funded union time.

Republicans in the House and Senate, such as Sens. Mike Lee and Joni Ernst, have filed bills to ban taxpayer-funded union time.

Ernst tried to fit a provision on the measure in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that it did not fit the rules of budget reconciliation, by which a bill can pass the Senate without meeting the 60-vote threshold to end a filibuster.

This article was originally published at The Daily Signal.