Federal website tracking taxpayer-funded union work disappears

(The Center Square) – The Biden administration is under fire after a website to help keep federal funding of union work transparent disappeared.

The federal site in question tracks what is called “official time,” a term for when taxpayer-funded federal employees use part of their work hours to work on behalf of a public union.

The Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit group that works on these issues, released a report on the Biden administration change. The tracking site was on the Office of Personnel Management’s website since 2013, but appears to have been taken down over the summer.

An Office of Personnel Management spokesperson told The Center Square “previous reports on official time are not currently available because OPM is reorganizing our website to improve navigation and customer experience.”

Freedom Foundation responded to that defense saying “there is no indication OPM’s website has been or is in the process of being overhauled in any major way,” adding that, “to this date, not only does the official time page remain nonfunctional, but most links to prior OPM pages with past official time reports and explanations have also been taken down.”

The Department of Labor did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

“Unions and Democrat administrations generally seek to maximize official time, since shifting the costs of union administration to taxpayers frees up union treasuries to increase engagement in politics, lobbying and other ideological activities that advance progressive interests,” the Freedom Foundation said. “Republican administrations are generally more skeptical of official time, viewing it as an unjustified giveaway to unions at taxpayers’ expense.”

Federally-funded employees working on behalf of unions is not new, being codified in 1978, but managing that interplay has been difficult from the start.

In 1979, the GAO concluded that “no one knows how much official time is authorized for Federal employees” because of “widespread failure” to keep adequate records.

“In congressional testimony from 1996, a GAO official reported that ‘[T]he extent to which federal taxpayers subsidize the activities of federal employee unions… cannot be answered with any precision.’”

Spurred in part by the lack of accountability in tracking that time, OPM has released occasional reports on the issue. Biden has vocally backed unions for years and pushed for increased unionization of the federal workforce.

Ashley Varner from the Freedom Foundation told The Center Square that the change paves the way for taxpayer-funded employees doing union’s bidding.

“It may not sound like a big deal at first glance, but when we’re talking about federal employees doing the union’s business on government time — that means the union is passing that expense on to the taxpayer and the union gets to put its money to other uses, like politics and lobbying, and regular Americans are covering that cost,” Varner said. “This administration is showing us exactly to whom they are accountable – and it’s not the American taxpayer.”

Former President Donald Trump issued an executive order in May of 2018 to regulate and limit official time use in the federal government, but President Joe Biden quickly repealed that order after taking office.

Critics say the Biden administration is not being transparent.

“Blocking the public from seeing just how much government ‘work’ time is spent on union organizing and politics is a slap in the face to the taxpayer who pays those salaries out of their hard-earned paychecks,” Varner told The Center Square. “The reporting website has been down for ‘restructuring’ for more than three months now, and it’s not hiding a Biden OPM report, because they haven’t bothered to conduct one in three years.”