While public-sector unions file lawsuits to block President Donald Trump’s reforms to the bureaucracy, federal government workers are getting paid by the taxpayer for time they spend doing work for those very same unions.
The little-known practice of “official time” allows bureaucrats to bill the taxpayer for hours they spend doing work for the union. Members of Congress have filed bills to ban the practice, but a budget expert suggests that taxing the practice instead might pose a smaller hurdle for getting it through Congress.
While most bills face a 60-vote threshold to avoid a filibuster and get through the Senate, senators could pass such a tax through a process known as budget reconciliation—a process by which bills only require a majority of senators’ votes to pass.
Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va., a member of the House Budget Committee, told The Daily Signal he supports the idea of taxing official time.
“Taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill for federal employees to conduct union business instead of fulfilling their official duties,” Cline said in an emailed statement Wednesday. “Taxing or ending ‘official time’ altogether are commonsense options to ensure taxpayer dollars are used responsibly while increasing accountability in the federal workforce.”
“It’s important that public funds serve the American people, not private union interests,” he added.
Senate Republicans also condemned official time.
“Federal employees should not engage in union activities on the taxpayer’s dime, which is why I’ve introduced legislation to ban the practice,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told The Daily Signal. He was referring to the No Union Time on the Taxpayers’ Dime Act, a bill he filed in July. The bill never made it out of committee.
“So-called ‘official time’ has been abused as essentially publicly funded political organizing by government employees on federal property, which would be illegal in any other context,” Lee added. “We should get rid of it. Public servants should serve the public while on the clock.”
“Bureaucrats seems to have forgotten that they serve the American people, not themselves,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, told The Daily Signal. “If federal employees want to engage in union activity while on the clock instead of doing their job, they need to reimburse taxpayers for every last cent.”
“My Protecting Taxpayers’ Wallet Act ends the absurd practice of taxpayer-funded union time and eliminates tax dollars for public unions,” she added. Ernst was referring to legislation banning official time that she filed earlier this month.
Ernst has exposed bureaucrats claiming to be on taxpayer-funded union time while sitting in jail or after moving to Florida. As chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, which aims to help the Department of Government Efficiency combat fraud, waste, and abuse, Ernst moved to outlaw official time as part of her effort to get the federal workforce back to work.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, suggested he would be open to passing a tax on official time through the budget reconciliation process.
“I think that’s an interesting idea,” he told The Daily Signal in an interview on Thursday. “There’s no doubt we are going to need to consider a number of ideas that are fundamentally transformational. If you look at the election in November, this was a mandate. … We have an historic opportunity right now; we can’t miss the moment.”
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., agreed that Congress should get rid of official time.
“We shouldn’t be paying for somebody to do something besides their job as a federal worker. That’s the No. 1 thing,” Scott told The Daily Signal in an interview on Thursday. “The American taxpayer is not interested in paying for somebody to do a job that’s not part of their job, to provide a service or provide a product, or something like that.”
He did not specifically address taxing official time in budget reconciliation, but he insisted that the government should not “allow people to get paid to work on doing something that’s not their job as a federal employee.”
“That needs to be changed,” Scott added.
While Lee’s and Ernst’s bills take aim at official time, they may fall short of the mark when it comes to getting through the legislative process, experts note.
“Though this practice of abusing official time should be banned outright, Democrats are unlikely to join with Republicans to give them the 60-vote threshold in the Senate that’s required to do so,” Richard Stern, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Grover Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told The Daily Signal. “Banning the practice would also not fit with the tight requirements of what could be done in a reconciliation bill—which only requires 51 votes in the Senate.”
“However, imposing taxes on the practice would fit the parameters of reconciliation,” Stern noted. “Using tax policy in this manner would allow a conservative majority in Congress to pass a policy that would work towards ending this terrible abuse of the taxpayer’s dollar.”
To drive the point home, Stern noted, “Your tax dollars quite literally go to pay for the salaries of people while they are doing work for unions that is often at odds with what is in the best interest of the country.”
Sean Higgins, a deregulation and labor union analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, agreed.
He told The Daily Signal he would prefer to ban official time outright, but “if reconciliation is a means to do this, it’s an interesting approach and a worthy try.”
Higgins noted that the Office of Personnel Management previously published the amounts the federal government spent on official time in a regular report titled “Taxpayer-Funded Union Time Usage in the Federal Government.” The Biden administration not only stopped publishing the reports but removed the web page hosting previous reports.
“They got rid of it because it was embarrassing,” Higgins said. “The unions just don’t want us to know that this happens. I’m sure the broader public doesn’t know it exists or would be surprised to find out about this phenomenon.”
Ernst and Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, wrote to Charles Ezell, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management in the new Trump administration, to restart the annual reports, and an OPM spokesperson told The Daily Signal the office will again release this information under Trump.
“OPM is committed to transparency and accountability,” the spokesperson told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement Thursday. “We are in the process of compiling this data and will begin releasing this information again. Unfortunately, the previous administration halted its publication, shielding unions from taxpayer scrutiny. We are working to restore this critical transparency for the American people.”
Higgins, the Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar, noted that official time is “literally just people being paid by the government not to work for the government but to work for entities that seek to increase costs for the taxpayer.”
Only 5.9% of private sector workers were union members last year, while 32% of public sector workers had joined unions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The aggregate number of employees belonging to unions in the public sector (7 million) was roughly the same as those in the private sector (7.2 million).
Higgins contrasted “the days when a union worker was someone who worked in a factory and was trying to get a few extra hours or a safety regulation” with today. “Now, the typical worker is someone who works for the government, and the union makes it impossible for them to get fired by the government.”
He further noted that “any person who works for any organization tends to get territorial and parochial” and will likely “resent anybody from the outside telling them what to do.” Bureaucrats have often seen their work as apolitical and have stayed in the administrative state from one administration to another.
Trump is not carrying out business as usual, however. Higgins described Trump’s reforms as “the first time somebody has tried to seriously throw a wrench in the system and rework it from the ground up.”
Now, public sector unions like the American Federation of Government Employees, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, are filing lawsuits to block Trump’s reforms.
“They’re just trying to protect their members as they see fit,” Higgins noted. “They’re for the status quo ante, and the administration is not.”
A recent poll found that 64% of Washington, D.C.-based federal employees who voted for Kamala Harris in November say they will refuse a lawful Trump order if they consider it bad policy. Trump aims to prevent this deep state from growing.
The American Federation of Government Employees did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment about whether federal employees have claimed official time in work related to the lawsuits they have filed against the Trump administration.