A top Senate waste-watcher says the Biden administration is in the process of signing more long-term agreements with federal employee unions letting them work from home.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), the chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, wrote to 24 agencies on Thursday demanding they cease efforts to bind President-Elect Donald Trump’s hands before he takes office in a month.
“I am calling on you to stop all collective bargaining or any other contractual arrangements related to telework for federal employees extending beyond the few weeks remaining in the Biden administration. Giving bureaucrats another four-year vacation from the office is unacceptable. Bureaucrats have had enough gap years—it’s time to get them back to work. Americans are tired of being put on hold by bureaucrats who are phoning it in,” she wrote.
She said a whistleblower told her that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is on the verge of signing a contract that would run through 2029, “the top four priorities of which are, in order: solidifying telework and remote work privileges, limiting accountability through hamstringing employee performance review processes, maximizing use of taxpayer-funded union time, and lastly, permitting the use of agency facilities for union offices.”
The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) is frantically working to unionize lawyers at the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and Environment and Natural Resources Division, explicitly using the potential of continuing to work from home to gain buy-in, she added.
A union representing hundreds of Bureau of Land Management employees who work at its headquarters are also “scrambling” to sign a deal with the Biden administration, with a union head calling on Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to do a deal before Biden’s term ends.
Ernst cited The Daily Wire’s report highlighting the circumstances behind the Social Security Administration signing a telework deal through 2029, which suggested that it was not a compromise between management and labor, but rather a deal worked out between people who were both sitting on the same side of the table.
Martin O’Malley, the agency head appointed by Joe Biden, partied with the union at a junket in Florida, signed the contract days later, then immediately resigned his post to run for chair of the Democratic National Committee — being owed favors from politically connected unions could help him attain the DNC chair.
The contract shows that the work-from-home agreement was structured as a settlement resolving years-old allegations of racism, meaning O’Malley could have signed it previously — but chose not to take away his own management prerogative, only those of his successor.
Ernst said other agencies have also recently finalized such deals. On December 3, 2024, the National Park Services (NPS) signed a contract with two unions representing Washington, D.C.-based employees that would also, coincidentally, run through the entirety of the Trump administration. One of the unions said to expect “virtually all NPS positions” to be “eligible for telework,” with no requirement to come in more than once a week.
An American Federation of Government Employees union representing 1,000 employees of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission earlier this year signed an agreement stretching into 2030, with the union highlighting that employees would only need to come to work one day a week. The agency is among those who are also on a last-minute hiring spree loading up the federal agency with DEI employees, searching for a “recent graduate” to pay $88,926 as a “diversity data analyst.”
Ernst said government employee union leaders are ungrateful and insatiable. The union representing employees at the Department of Labor — which is headed by the fiercely pro-union Julie Su — is fighting with Su, saying her request that employees come to work half the time is draconian, engaging in “a fruitless 11-hour mediation session.”
Taxpayers actually pay for employees to do union work, like advocating for contracts, instead of their actual jobs. For many years, the Office Personnel Management published data about how much money was spent on taxpayer-funded union time, or “official time,” but the Biden administration stopped that transparency practice.
CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE
The latest available figures are from 2019, when agencies spent $135 million paying employees who were actually conducting union work, plus $25 million in office space and other goods.
Ernst said that after repeated inquiries, HUD gave limited, more recent data, showing that it paid employees for between 27,000 and 41,000 hours of union work per year. “Among the HUD employees who did claim [Taxpayer-Funded Union Time], one was paid for sitting in a jail cell, another is running a real estate business in Florida, and a third is supposed to be in Colorado but allegedly routinely goes on paid vacations, including spending a week on the beach in Puerto Rico,” Ernst wrote.
In the letters sent to two dozen agencies, she demanded that they not sign union contracts tying Trump’s hands, that they provide final and draft copies of union agreements, and that they produce data about taxpayer-funded union activity. In a statement, she said, “The entire concept of public service is being perverted by public employee union bosses who forget the obligation of government workers is to serve the American people, not themselves.”
“The one government employee who won’t have to worry about coming back into the office ever again after January 20, 2025, is President Biden. But as for the millions of others on the public dole, they work for taxpayers … and soon, for President Trump, not the president of a labor union,” she said.
Ernst worked with inspectors general to conduct a large-scale investigation that found that federal employees never returned to the office after the COVID pandemic. It found that only 6% of federal employees report to work in person every day, that one-third are still fully remote, and that the government spends $16 billion a year on office buildings with a 12% occupancy rate. She said some of the employees who are “working remotely” aren’t doing much at all, which she said has contributed to citizens receiving a frustrating lack of services.
Related: Government Union’s Top Workers’ Rights Official Mistreated Employees, Probe Finds
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A top Senate waste-watcher says the Biden administration is in the process of signing more long-term agreements with federal employee unions letting them work from home.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), the chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, wrote to 24 agencies on Thursday demanding they cease efforts to bind President-Elect Donald Trump’s hands before he takes office in a month.
“I am calling on you to stop all collective bargaining or any other contractual arrangements related to telework for federal employees extending beyond the few weeks remaining in the Biden administration. Giving bureaucrats another four-year vacation from the office is unacceptable. Bureaucrats have had enough gap years—it’s time to get them back to work. Americans are tired of being put on hold by bureaucrats who are phoning it in,” she wrote.
She said a whistleblower told her that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is on the verge of signing a contract that would run through 2029, “the top four priorities of which are, in order: solidifying telework and remote work privileges, limiting accountability through hamstringing employee performance review processes, maximizing use of taxpayer-funded union time, and lastly, permitting the use of agency facilities for union offices.”
The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) is frantically working to unionize lawyers at the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and Environment and Natural Resources Division, explicitly using the potential of continuing to work from home to gain buy-in, she added.
A union representing hundreds of Bureau of Land Management employees who work at its headquarters are also “scrambling” to sign a deal with the Biden administration, with a union head calling on Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to do a deal before Biden’s term ends.
Ernst cited The Daily Wire’s report highlighting the circumstances behind the Social Security Administration signing a telework deal through 2029, which suggested that it was not a compromise between management and labor, but rather a deal worked out between people who were both sitting on the same side of the table.
Martin O’Malley, the agency head appointed by Joe Biden, partied with the union at a junket in Florida, signed the contract days later, then immediately resigned his post to run for chair of the Democratic National Committee — being owed favors from politically connected unions could help him attain the DNC chair.
The contract shows that the work-from-home agreement was structured as a settlement resolving years-old allegations of racism, meaning O’Malley could have signed it previously — but chose not to take away his own management prerogative, only those of his successor.
Ernst said other agencies have also recently finalized such deals. On December 3, 2024, the National Park Services (NPS) signed a contract with two unions representing Washington, D.C.-based employees that would also, coincidentally, run through the entirety of the Trump administration. One of the unions said to expect “virtually all NPS positions” to be “eligible for telework,” with no requirement to come in more than once a week.
An American Federation of Government Employees union representing 1,000 employees of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission earlier this year signed an agreement stretching into 2030, with the union highlighting that employees would only need to come to work one day a week. The agency is among those who are also on a last-minute hiring spree loading up the federal agency with DEI employees, searching for a “recent graduate” to pay $88,926 as a “diversity data analyst.”
Ernst said government employee union leaders are ungrateful and insatiable. The union representing employees at the Department of Labor — which is headed by the fiercely pro-union Julie Su — is fighting with Su, saying her request that employees come to work half the time is draconian, engaging in “a fruitless 11-hour mediation session.”
Taxpayers actually pay for employees to do union work, like advocating for contracts, instead of their actual jobs. For many years, the Office Personnel Management published data about how much money was spent on taxpayer-funded union time, or “official time,” but the Biden administration stopped that transparency practice.
CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE
The latest available figures are from 2019, when agencies spent $135 million paying employees who were actually conducting union work, plus $25 million in office space and other goods.
Ernst said that after repeated inquiries, HUD gave limited, more recent data, showing that it paid employees for between 27,000 and 41,000 hours of union work per year. “Among the HUD employees who did claim [Taxpayer-Funded Union Time], one was paid for sitting in a jail cell, another is running a real estate business in Florida, and a third is supposed to be in Colorado but allegedly routinely goes on paid vacations, including spending a week on the beach in Puerto Rico,” Ernst wrote.
In the letters sent to two dozen agencies, she demanded that they not sign union contracts tying Trump’s hands, that they provide final and draft copies of union agreements, and that they produce data about taxpayer-funded union activity. In a statement, she said, “The entire concept of public service is being perverted by public employee union bosses who forget the obligation of government workers is to serve the American people, not themselves.”
“The one government employee who won’t have to worry about coming back into the office ever again after January 20, 2025, is President Biden. But as for the millions of others on the public dole, they work for taxpayers … and soon, for President Trump, not the president of a labor union,” she said.
Ernst worked with inspectors general to conduct a large-scale investigation that found that federal employees never returned to the office after the COVID pandemic. It found that only 6% of federal employees report to work in person every day, that one-third are still fully remote, and that the government spends $16 billion a year on office buildings with a 12% occupancy rate. She said some of the employees who are “working remotely” aren’t doing much at all, which she said has contributed to citizens receiving a frustrating lack of services.
Related: Government Union’s Top Workers’ Rights Official Mistreated Employees, Probe Finds
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