Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a champion of private sector unions, wrote in an August 1937 letter to the National Federation of Federal Employees that “All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”

A report released last month by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on the massive influence and cost of union control within the federal government demonstrates how prescient FDR’s warning about government union bargaining really was.

This report revealed that, in the year 2024 alone, union operatives in the federal government had received $207 million in taxpayer subsidies to perform well over 3 million hours of union tasks. These are hours they were on the government payroll, but not performing work to contribute to the missions of the agencies that supposedly employ them. Among the worst offenders were the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Department of War, and the Department of Homeland Security, which spent $20-40 million each purely on union business last year.

The report shows why President Trump was right to issue his March 2025 executive order ending union monopoly bargaining across 75 percent of the federal workforce on national security grounds. But the report equally makes the case for ending union boss bargaining powers within the government entirely.

After all, most people should agree that VA employees should be paid from taxpayer coffers for caring for the nation’s veterans, not for doing union tasks like grievance adjustment or politics-related work (a practice commonly referred to as “union time” or “official time”).

In response to Trump’s March 2025 order, the VA announced in August it had ended union bargaining across most of the department, which liberated the agency from official time obligations so millions of dollars and man hours could go back to helping America’s vets. But official time represents just a fraction of the true cost of union boss control over the federal government. The VA’s move also freed the agency from “millions of dollars in lost rent and expenses for union bosses’ government phones and computer equipment.”

The last part of the VA’s announcement was probably the most significant: “Labor contracts have restricted managers’ ability to hire, promote and reward high-performing employees, hold poor performers accountable and implement reforms to better serve Veterans. Today’s decision frees VA managers to act in the best interests of Veterans rather than union bosses.”

Giving union bosses power to control how public employees are compensated and managed doesn’t only hold public services hostage to inefficient or wasteful union work rules. As a matter of principle, union monopoly bargaining in the public sector undermines representative government.

Voters elect politicians to carry out public policy, not to negotiate with unaccountable union bosses over such policies and where tax-dollars should be directed.

Later in his letter, FDR drove this point home: “The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with [union officials]. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress.”

Yet voters and their tax dollars aren’t the only victims of government union boss power. Productive and independent-minded public employees lose out when federal union officials wield their power not to reward the best workers, but to protect their lazy and/or incompetent coworkers.

Government union corruption is another problem that should concern everyone involved. According to recent U.S. Labor Department data, the 320,000-member American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) accounted for more than 10% of all “union corruption convictions” between 2012 and 2022, even though AFGE covers “just 2% of all unionized workers.”  Over the decade covered, AFGE – the largest federal union – had the “highest conviction rate” of any U.S. union.

Trump’s March 2025 executive order goes a long way toward putting American citizens and their elected representatives back in control of the federal government, not to mention freeing good federal employees from rigid union structures. Ultimately, though, as FDR advocated, all federal government union bargaining should be ended so no federal employee can be forced under union “representation” they oppose.

Until then, a meaningful start would be ending all official time in the federal government, not just the part covered by Trump’s executive order. The aptly named “No Union Time on the Taxpayer’s Dime Act” would do just that.

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