Part of the Trump Administration’s efforts to improve efficiency, accountability, and transparency in the federal government include minimizing the amount of taxpayer-funded time that federal employees spend working for their unions instead of doing the jobs they were hired to perform.
This “paid union leave” is otherwise known as “official time.”
A Feb. 27 memo from President Donald Trump’s Office of Personnel Management directs agencies to “authorize taxpayer-funded union time only in amounts that are reasonable, necessary, and in the public interest and to monitor its use to see that it is used efficiently.”
It also requires agencies to resume tracking and reporting on the number of federal employees and the amount of time they spend working for their unions, as well as tracking and reporting other federal taxpayer subsidies provided to unions.
This is not a new policy. Historically, both Democrat and Republican administrations tracked and published “official time” metrics, but the Biden administration removed the OPM webpage that contained those reports (the site now displays an error message) and told agencies they did not have to report official time.
Nevertheless, a congressional oversight request provides some insight into official time under the Biden administration, including 1,030 employees at the Social Security Administration spending a total of 242,237 hours on official time at a cost to taxpayers of $15.1 million in Fiscal Year 2023. That included $1.43 million to pay 14 Social Security Administration employees who spent 100 percent of their time working for their union.
While we don’t know how much total time and money federal employees are currently spending on official time, we can safely assume it is at least as much as the 3.6 million hours that nearly 2,000 federal employees spent on official time in 2016, which was at the last year of the Obama administration.
At that rate, and accounting for average federal employee compensation of over $160,000 per year in 2024, official time is costing federal taxpayers at least $321 million per year.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the highest users of official time, even as a report from Sen Jon Ernst, R-Iowa, found that “[t]housands of calls from veterans seeking mental health care go unanswered” in just one VA office alone.
Reports of nurses at the VA spending 100 percent of their time working for their union instead of treating patients were an impetus to Trump’s executive order that prevented federal employees from spending more than 25 percent of their work hours working for their union. But the Biden administration reversed that order, removing all limits, and all reporting on official time.
Some concerning information is likely to come out of agencies’ revived reports on official time.
In addition to tracking the number of employees and their time, agencies also have to report on other taxpayer-provided subsidies to unions. That would include, for example, “a single Veterans Affairs facility allocate[ing] half of a hospital wing—over 5,000 square feet—largely for the use of the union president and officials” as exposed in a report from the Institute for the American Worker report.
The irony of federal employees’ excessive use of official time is that they can’t even bargain for the biggest things most unions bargain over—pay and benefits. And working predominantly in offices (or, prior to Trump’s executive order requiring federal employees to return to the office, in their homes) hardly poses a need for lengthy worker safety negotiations.
That leaves official time to be predominantly spent defending poor performers and bad actors that agencies have disciplined or dismissed, and negotiating over tedious things like the height of cubicle panels; designated smoking areas on otherwise smoke-free campuses; and the right to wear spandex at work.
Trump’s memorandum will restore accountability to official time, but Congress would need to act to end it entirely. The “No Union Time on the Taxpayers’ Dime Act,” introduced by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and then-Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., would end the practice of official time, thereby requiring federal union members to foot the bill for their own activities.
