Out of touch special interests are manipulating government to their own benefit at the expense of average Americans. This popular sentiment has been leveled at politicians, lobbyists, and big businesses — and many of them are guilty — but there is one culprit in Washington taking advantage of the working-class that is too often ignored: government unions.
A new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirms that federal government bureaucrats are compensated more generously than average Americans in the private sector, the people who actually fund government.
Worse yet, the discrepancy is largest for workers at the lower end of socioeconomic ladder: federal workers with no more than a high school education earned 34 percent more and their benefits were 93 percent higher than similar workers in the private sector, a significantly larger disparity than when comparing workers with higher levels of education.
Moreover, in the private sector, workers are generally at-will employees rewarded on their merit. They are paid market value, and there is an incentive for people to work hard and for businesses to pay well — lest a worker is let go, or alternatively chooses to work somewhere he or she is paid better.
But most bureaucrats are not at-will employees. Many receive promotions and pay raises simply based on longevity, even if their work product is unremarkable. Similarly, it is extremely difficult to dismiss ineffective or misbehaving employees. A 2015 Government Accountability Office report showed that it can take between 170 and 370 days to fire a bad employee (not to mention the appeal process which averages 243 days).
GAO found that because of the “bureaucratic obstructions,” many supervisors simply choose to do nothing to employees that should be dismissed, like the Environmental Protection Agency employee who was caught watching pornography at work for six hours a day but remained on payroll for fourth months after he was banned from the building.
In total, government employees are fired about one-third as often as private sector employees accountable to market forces. Would anyone argue that unaccountable federal bureaucrats are three times better employees than private sector workers? Likely not, but their jobs are much cushier anyway.
Unions represent nearly 40 percent of all government employees (more than five times the private sector portion) and are often responsible for negotiating these generous terms. After all, they are essentially negotiating with people they help elect, which is a great deal for bureaucrats, but a raw deal for taxpayers.
To make matters worse, inflated compensation is not the only way the private sector is subsidizing unions. Thanks to a benefit known as “official time,” government employees can spend taxpayer-funded working hours conducting union business rather than serving the American people.
It is likely that thousands of federal employees are spending 100 percent of their time performing union activity instead of the public service they were hired to do, costing taxpayers at least $162 million a year.
For example, at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where war heroes were dying while waiting in line for medical care, bureaucrats spent more than a million hours on union official time in 2012, costing taxpayers nearly $47 million.
And like a bad infomercial, there’s more. Not only are taxpayers funding inflated government salaries and union activity, they are also underwriting the actual collection of union dues. Unions are given the privilege of having dues automatically deducted from workers’ paychecks, meaning taxpayer-funded resources are used to do so. This deduction includes the collection of political dues, which unions can receive without written consent from workers.
Finally, perhaps the most damaging effect of the government employee status quo is the growth of regulations that accompanies it. Data from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University shows that as agency employment has grown, so too has the number of federal regulations, which harm job creation and cost the American public billions of dollars a year.
Changing the government employment status quo is imperative if Congress and President Trump are to live up to their promise to “drain the swamp.” They should cut overly generous federal benefits packages and enact civil service reforms like those pushed by Gov. Scott Walker, R-Wis., which have saved more than $5 billion. In addition, Rep. Jody Hice’s, R-Ga., Official Time Reform Act would significantly curb union official time, and Rep. Ted Budd’s, R-N.C., National Paycheck Protection Act (endorsed by Americans for Prosperity) would end automatic dues deduction.
These are just a few of the reforms to bring government bureaucrats back in line with the people they serve, and the necessity of these changes cannot be overstated — perhaps that is why even President Franklin Roosevelt and the first president of the AFL-CIO opposed the idea of unions in government entirely.
Akash Chougule (@AkashJC) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the director of policy at Americans for Prosperity.
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