“Official time” is an oxymoron that conveniently misleads federal taxpayers.
When federal employees are on “official time,” they’re not doing the jobs they were hired for. Instead, they’re released from their official duties and working for their union—all while getting their taxpayer-funded federal employee salaries and benefits.
Some lawmakers believe this needs to stop.
That’s why Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., propose a bill called the No Union Time on the Taxpayer’s Dime Act, which would end the practice of official time.
Instead, under the Lee-Bishop bill introduced Tuesday, federal employees who want to work for their union would have to do so on their own time and would have to be paid by their union instead of taxpayers.
The problem with so-called official time goes beyond taxpayer money being wasted on federal services that aren’t being delivered.
In many cases, federal employees use official time to negotiate for things that directly contradict taxpayers’ interests, such as collective telework entitlements that reduce the quality of government services and legal representation to shield recalcitrant and destructive federal employees from disciplinary actions.
Although the Trump-Pence administration tried to rein in official time—limiting it to no more than 25% of employees’ time—the Biden-Harris administration reversed those reforms. Taxpayers presumably once again pay some employees to spend 100% of their time working for their unions.
I say presumably because the Biden-Harris administration removed the Office of Personnel Management’s webpage on official time, which had provided transparency for more than a decade on how many federal employees did work for their union instead of for taxpayers, and how much time they spent doing it.
Although we no longer know how many federal employees use official time, or how much total time they’re using, the disappearing webpage doesn’t indicate that official time has declined.
Data from the last year of the Obama administration in 2016 shows that federal employees spent 3.6 million hours—the equivalent of close to 2,000 full-time federal employees—on taxpayer-funded union time.
Based on today’s average federal employee salary of $106,000 and another $56,500 in benefits, if federal employees performed as much official time in 2024 as they did in 2016 they would cost taxpayers over $321 million per year.
And beyond the costs, when federal employees don’t perform their jobs it impedes the delivery of federal services. When nurses at the Veterans Administration spend 100% of their time working for their union and don’t treat a single patient, that hurts veterans.
According to a Government Accountability Office report in 2017 that examined official time at the Department of Veterans Affairs, “a manager … interviewed said it can be especially challenging to find other staff to fill in for employees who are responsible for serving patients yet spend most of their work time on official time.”
It’s time for the federal government to stop paying federal employees to do anything other than their jobs.