Your hard-earned tax dollars don’t just fund the salaries of federal bureaucrats, they also support public-sector unions who negotiate sweetheart deals between the bureaucrats and management. Federal bureaucrats feverishly renegotiated those deals just before President Donald Trump entered office, attempting to block his reforms.
Now, the Trump administration is demanding that each agency provide an accounting of just how much money it spent negotiating collective bargaining agreements with unions.
The Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the federal government’s workforce, sent a memo Monday to agencies across the bureaucracy, demanding and account of the dollars and cents taxpayers spent for collective bargaining agreements. (Collective bargaining refers to the process by which a union negotiates with management to secure employees certain benefits, such as raises, more paid time off, and other forms of compensation.)
“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.”
While the federal government has previously tracked “official time”—the time government employees spend working for the union but for which they get paid by the taxpayer—Ezell noted that the government has not systematically tracked the specific cost of federal collective bargaining negotiations.
Collective bargaining negotiations may cost a great deal. “The Social Security Administration, for example, reported that it cost the agency over $1.8 million to negotiate [collective bargaining agreements] with two of its bargaining units,” Ezell noted. This number did not include the cost of another round of bargaining in the middle of the time covered by the agreement.
Ezell’s memo directs federal agencies to submit by April 18 a report detailing the expenses for collective bargaining and the current status of collective bargaining agreements.
The report must include the compensation paid to agency employees to negotiate collective bargaining agreements, to process grievances related to the agreements, to engage in mediation, and other things. It must list travel and lodging expenses for agency staff and union staff to negotiate the agreements, expenses paid for retaining experts in the bargaining, costs of administrative support for negotiating and maintaining the agreements, and “the fair market value of agency office space provided to labor unions,” among other things.
The report must also outline all collective bargaining agreements currently in force at the agency, the time each agreement came into effect and when it will expire, and how much time each agreement took to hash out.
After Trump won the 2024 presidential election, federal government unions negotiated new collective bargaining agreements in an attempt to prevent the incoming president from changing civil service rules.
“In the final days of the prior administration’s tenure, it purposefully finalized collective bargaining agreements with federal employees in an effort to harm my administration by extending its wasteful and failing policies beyond its time in office,” Trump wrote in a Jan. 31 memo restricting collective bargaining in the final days of a president’s term. “Such last-minute, lame-duck [agreements], which purport to bind a new president to his predecessor’s policies, run counter to America’s system of democratic self-government.”
The memo cites a Department of Education agreement negotiated on Jan. 17, three days before Trump took office. Martin O’Malley, commission of the Social Security Administration under Biden, made an agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees in December 2024 guaranteeing that the agency’s 42,000 employees would not have to work in the office during the Trump administration—after Trump had announced that he would require in-office work.
Now, the American Federation of Government Employees has filed multiple lawsuits to block Trump’s reforms.
