America's Talking - ‘Disappointed:’ Senator Blasts Biden Admin for Cutting Back Union Transparency Site

Episode Date: March 30, 2024

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., blasted the Biden administration Wednesday for cutting back on a federal effort to increase union accountability and transparency. The Center Square exclusively obtained a letter this week that was sent from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to 10 U.S. senators. In the letter, OPM Director Kiran Ahuja defended the agency’s decision to remove a webpage built to hold unions accountable. The federal webpage in question included data on “official time,” a common practice where federal employees use work time to do union business and are therefore paid by taxpayers to do so. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, chief content officer at the Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. We are recording this on Friday, March 29th. When running for office, President Joe Biden said he would be the most union-friendly president in the history of the United States. After exclusive reporting from the Center Square this week, we now have some idea what that means. Joining me to discuss this and his own reporting on you. Union transparency is Casey Harper, the center scores Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief. Casey, tell us about your reporting on this government website that no longer exists. Yeah, so this is a pretty interesting story, and it typifies as what you said, Dan, which is President Joe Biden's effort to be the most pro-union president. I think maybe for once a politician is trying to keep their campaign promises is what we're seeing here. But so essentially, there's something called official time, which I have to explain first. Official time is when a federal employee is allowed to do union work, union bidding, union negotiations on work hours. Dan, it's kind of like, you know, how you will be on Facebook for a few hours, and that's on work time, right?

So that's Facebook time. Right. Right. So official time is when essentially taxpayers pay federal employees to work for unions. And this is not a new thing. This is not a Biden era issue. This has been going on for decades. But in 1978, federal government. it, you know, codified it, but it was already going on. And so, um, there's been concerns from the

start that this could be abused, misused for obvious reasons. Uh, if taxpayer, it's basically taxpayer resources going directly to unions with little to no oversight. And so that's what this story is about oversight in an effort to increase oversight and to track how, just how much time were federal employees using to work for unions. Uh, they, they created this database, this federal website at the Office of Personnel Management's on their website, right? So OPM, they're kind of the sort of like HR for the federal government. And last year, mysteriously, this federal accountability page that keeps track of, you know, hey, how many, how much, how many hours are federal employees just giving to unions and doing union work? That website disappeared, Dan. And so we

wrote about that. I talked to OPM at the time. And they basically led me to believe that, oh, this is just a website. You know, we're reworking the website. Don't, you know, don't worry. Just give us time. And I said, okay, so I wrote up a story. You know, here we are in the next year and the website's done on up. And so, you know, there's more to the story, Dan, but it just raises questions of accountability. How far is too far when it comes to Biden trying to help out these unions he promised to help on the campaign trail. So yet several months after you first reported it, in OPM, the federal government, the agency that oversees, on this transparency website told you that, oh, it's just under maintenance.

We're just reworking the website. It'll be back up at some point. Several months after, it still wasn't up. You checked in on it. They kind of sort of ghosted you. Wouldn't talk to you. But then you found out that, large part, because of your reporting last year, some Republican U.S. senators got involved and started asking the same questions.

And they replied to these senators, and you got an exclusive copy of the letter that was sent to the U.S. Senators. And it essentially said it's not coming back. Right. I mean, you know, in the way that a federal bureaucrat can take many sentences to say one thing, that's what it was. I mean, they really defend, OPM defended their decision, but they're not really reinstating the website at all.

And so what they're doing, and they just moved, they said, well, we move the reports to this other page. When you go to their page, it has one report from 2019. And so, you know, there's no database of past reports or any, you know, history to it. There's also 2019, which means that no federal oversight has been conducted or made public about this issue since President Biden took office. And so it's really actually intensified just because you realize it's not just that, you know, the IT, it's not, the story is not that the IT department, you know, it was kind of finangling with the website and took something down. This is an intentional decision to remove this accountability aspect, probably because they haven't done any oversight since Biden took office. So why keep this website up if we're not going to do these

oversights, these reports, we haven't done one since the Trump administration? So this issue, I mean, we have no idea how much money is being funneled to these unions through official time, how many hours employees, federal employees are using to boost the union ranks. And of course, Dan, you know, the other, the next step in this is that unions give heavily in favor of Democrats. And so this is a sort of tit for tat situation where federal time, federal money is going directly these unions through a Biden administration policy. And then those unions, of course, turn around and give heavily to Democrats, especially, you know, Biden, who promised to be pro-union, most pro-union president in history. And so, you know, of course, it's not wrong for a politician

to do policies favorable to unions. But I think that both sides of the aisle should be able to agree that transparency, reporting, accountability should always take precedent over either political side. You can get the facts, get the accountability, and then make your decision. But to hide the data, I think that's not the best way to handle it. With the federal government nearly $35 trillion in debt, with interest payments on that debt, becoming almost the largest expense for federal government,

I would think federal bureaucrats, federal elected officials, should be worried about every single nickel and dime that is being spent. And this, yeah, this might be, in the vast scheme of things, you know, a small portion of federal government debt. But taxpayers are paying for the, employees to work on public service matters, not to work for their unions, not to campaign for politicians, et cetera. I'll give you the closing word on this, Casey. Yeah, I mean, so you would think that that would be the case, but it's actually the incentives are completely opposite because

if these federal bureaucrats come in under budget, then Congress, they know Congress will say, oh, we can cut the budget, you don't need as much money. So they all purposefully go up against the budget, spend every single penny that they have every year, and then go back to Congress and say, hey, we need a maybe a 3% increase or whatever it is. So they intentionally spend every dime, even if they don't need to, so they can go back and ask for an increase and say, hey, we maxed out our budget. That's kind of the strategy of the agency heads. And then that money funnels down to all the different people and their projects.

So the incentives are really bad. They lead to overspending. And it's kind of a prisoner's dilemma problem. So which agency head wants to be the one who does the right thing and they gets their budget cut? And then in two years, someone replaces them and just ask for more money. and undoes all their work and get, you know, meanwhile, the deficit. You know, the other way to think about it is the debt is going to continue hitting 35 trillion, whether or not my agency does the right thing, so why not get mine while I can't?

I think that's how they think. And it's a big part of the spending problem right now. Casey, thank you for joining us today. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecentersquare.com.