The mainstream legacy media and especially the hometown Washington Post have been castigating the Trump administration for its “war” on federal civil servants, especially for proposing to eliminate union collective bargaining at U.S. government agencies. (RELATED: The Trump Administration Sets Its Sights on the Parallel Government)

Yet, it was Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt — the one who began major federal support for private sector employee unions — who opposed the unionization of federal employees. He considered it a conflict of interest since, when government unions strike, they strike against taxpaying citizens. He considered this “unthinkable and intolerable.” Longtime private sector union AFL-CIO leader George Meany opposed federal government unions, too. (RELATED: Serving the Servants: Ending ‘Stakeholder’ Government)

It was not until President Jack Kennedy in the 1960s that federal unions successfully lobbied to represent employees in the national government, and that was merely by executive order rather than law. Legal status for unions was only adopted as part of a Congressional bargain with pro-union Democrats to pass President Jimmy Carter’s Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Even then, the federal unions could not directly bargain on pay or benefits and could not strike.

Even in the Carter administration, unions had been so opposed to the law’s restrictions on their actions that they in the end refused to meet with the Democratic director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management that the law created. Formal labor-management relations did not begin again until my own tenure as OPM director under Ronald Reagan. Unions were more successful in loosening labor restrictions in later administrations, including in other Republican administrations.

Fed unions remain unable to strike — enforced by President Reagan’s firing striking air-traffic controllers — so unions became powerful in more subtle ways. A study by the Institute for the American Worker documents how Federal government unionization works today. “Generally, federal employees are not permitted to strike, and their unions are limited in what conditions of employment they may bargain over.” Management rights and other matters “specifically provided” for by federal statute are still not bargainable. “This includes pay, health insurance, retirement, and certain workplace insurance (e.g., workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance), among other benefits.” The study continues,

But under the statute, federal employee unions have exclusive representation rights over bargaining units of employees, and employees in a bargaining unit are free to join or refrain from joining that union as members. Whether or not a federal employee chooses to join the union, that person is still covered by the negotiated collective bargaining agreement and its benefits, processes, and liabilities.

Since federal unions cannot bargain on pay and benefits, they must contest on minor matters. But when such matters reach an impasse, they then become subject to third-party mediation involving unions. If that fails, unions can assist in appeals to the Federal Service Impasses Panel. To do this, union officials have “official time” off from work — paid free time to represent employees. This takes time and significant line supervisor involvement and effort at a high management cost, which encourages settlements with unions even in weak cases.

The study concluded that not enough agencies returned data to them to fully measure the cost of union involvement. But based on what was submitted, the cost in time and funds from federal union activity must be in the hundreds of millions to even billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

A very wise Democratic public administration expert explained to me, off the record, the central problem in administering the federal bureaucracy. She noted that Republican cabinet leaders, mostly coming from private business, think they can manage government like the private sector, by delegating responsibility downward to their subordinates. But in government, there is only a performance appraisal system to measure how subordinates actually perform, and it does not work. My Democrats, she said, know better that bureaucracies are ruled by politics rather than by rules and appraisal systems. So, they should be able to manage better. But union power will not allow them to do so. That’s why neither party can effectively run the bureaucracy.

Some Republicans, such as Litton Industries’ and former OMB Director Roy Ash, understood, as did much of the Reagan administration, what libertarian scholar Ludwig von Mises had explained earlier, that government lacks an evaluation standard like profit-and-loss to effectively determine decentralized performance. Only the Reagan and Donald Trump transitions had understood the literature, however, and were ready to implement political management of the bureaucracy, ready to go from day one.

Executive orders on public administration from the very beginning stressed political administration over governmental business administration. And leaders were aware of the OPM powers needed to enforce them. A Trump executive order in March even proposed to end collective bargaining at certain agencies, including the Departments of State, Defense, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Health and Human Services, Treasury, Justice, and Commerce, and the part of Homeland Security responsible for border security. Only police and firefighters were directly exempted.

The unions, of course, went to court to contest it all, with a California federal court judge recently granting a national temporary restraining order to block federal government employee reductions. And unions have the resources and political power necessary for indefinite delay.

Governing magazine found that in the 2021-2022 election cycle, “the biggest public-sector unions spent more than $700 million on election-related activity,” including $160 million from union political action committees. Most union members and all their public-sector leaders are Democrats, and not surprisingly, 96 percent of their funding went to Democratic politics, while the data show that Republican political entities received almost nothing.

Federal government public sector unions, by themselves, are a substantial force. Open Secrets magazine showed that dues mostly paid from U.S. national government salaries (some unions have state members also) constituted half or more of total public sector union political contributions. Again, Democrats received almost all of the funds, while Republican and conservative groups received little or even zero contributions.

This union power has enormous political effects, especially over time and especially in the nation’s capital. I have noted for Spectator readers earlier that over my lifetime, my state of Maryland’s Republican House of Representatives delegation dropped from holding four of eight congressional district seats down to only one seat today. Similar shifts have taken place in Northern Virginia. Why? More government employees and contractors in the nation’s capital mean more political money and media support for Democrats.

Those union political contributions and influence have been a major part of the reasons for long-term Democratic political success. And this partisan funding ultimately comes from your taxpayer dollars.

Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles.

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