{"id":54133,"date":"2024-03-18T10:15:08","date_gmt":"2024-03-18T14:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=54133"},"modified":"2024-03-18T10:15:08","modified_gmt":"2024-03-18T14:15:08","slug":"your-tax-dollars-at-work-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=54133","title":{"rendered":"Your Tax Dollars At Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Thursday, The Daily Wire<\/a> posted an article about the amount of taxpayer money that goes to federal employees that actually work for the unions that represent federal employees rather than the government but are paid by the federal government.<\/p>\n

The article reports:<\/p>\n

The federal government pays more than $100 million a year to employees who aren\u2019t doing their actual government jobs, but rather working for unions representing government employees against management \u2014 with taxpayers essentially funding both sides of the bargaining table.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

For decades, the government has tracked and reported those figures, but the Biden administration has removed the reports.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Under the policy known as \u201cofficial time,\u201d hundreds of nominal government employees haven\u2019t done anything but full-time union work in years, yet remain on the federal payroll. Not only is the policy expensive to taxpayers, but it also props up the power of unions by subsidizing their activities, giving them resources even if employees don\u2019t support them enough to pay dues. Those unions fight against the firing of employees accused of misconduct, and advocate for policies that sometimes pit the interests of employees over the interests of taxpayers, such as resisting a return to in-person work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Office of Personnel Management has historically kept track of and published how the program is being used, including during the Obama administration. But the data has not been updated since 2019 \u2014 when the government shelled out for\u00a02.6 million hours<\/a>, or nearly 300 years\u2019 worth, of employee time that was actually spent on union business.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Biden administration has even been secretive about its secrecy. In December, The Daily Wire asked OPM why the page listing the reports was missing, along with all historical reports except 2019, which can only be located via the search function. A spokesperson said, \u201cPrevious reports on official time are not currently available because OPM is reorganizing our website to improve navigation and customer experience.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The article concludes:<\/p>\n

In 2014, the Washington Examiner found more than\u00a0500 employees<\/a>\u00a0who did no or almost no work for their actual government jobs, despite drawing a full-time salary from taxpayers, because of official time. That includes 271 employees on full-time union release with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and 201 from the IRS.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Then-Sen. Tom Coburn said \u201cI just don\u2019t think the federal taxpayers ought to be paying for that\u2026 That\u2019s what union dues are for. What\u2019s irksome to me is that we are paying someone to be a pharmacist or a nurse, but they\u2019re not doing that. They\u2019re doing union work.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Washington is due for a really good cleaning out!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Thursday, The Daily Wire posted an article about the amount of taxpayer money that goes to federal employees that actually work for the unions that represent federal employees rather than the government but are paid by the federal government. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12037,14827,10015,8702,11152,135,9765,9893,4380,14017,11823,2720,4656],"class_list":["post-54133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-daily-wire","tag-federal-employees","tag-federal-government","tag-funding","tag-government-jobs","tag-obama-administration","tag-office-of-personnel-management","tag-sen-tom-coburn","tag-tax-dollars","tag-the-biden-administration","tag-the-daily-wire","tag-the-washington-examiner","tag-unions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54133"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54134,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54133\/revisions\/54134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}