Legislation reintroduced this week would ban federal employees from using official time to conduct union related activities.
Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) reintroduced the No Union Time on the Taxpayer’s Dime Act (S. 1313). Companion legislation has been introduced in the House (H.R. 2676) by Congressman Ben Cline (R-VA). The legislation was also introduced in the previous session of Congress.
The legislation would amend current law (5 U.S.C. 7131) to explicitly prohibit the allowing federal employees to use official time. The change would stipulate that federal employees could only perform union related work while in a non-duty status.
Purpose of the Legislation
The lawmakers are introducing the bill because they believe that official time is a waste of taxpayer money. A document published by Lee’s office summarizing the legislation states, “Because federal law provides so few guard rails on the use of official time, federal employees are routinely able to abuse the process and to engage in overtly political activities during work hours or fail to do their job at all.”
It later adds:
The American taxpayer should not be obligated to pay federal employees to engage in union activities. The salaries of federal employees are financed exclusively by the taxpayers, and Americans are therefore right to expect that federal employees will actually be working while collecting a taxpayer-funded salary. Taxpayers should not be obligated to indirectly finance union-related activities that they may not agree with, nor should they be saddled with a bloated federal workforce made up of bureaucrats who are being paid to engage in activities other than their stated duties. Federal employees can engage in union-related activities, if they so choose, on their own time and at their own expense.
As evidence, Lee cites a past official time report published by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) which said that in 2016, federal employees spent 3.6 million hours on official time which cost taxpayers $177.2 million.
In FY 2019, the last available official time report published by OPM, agencies reported 2.6 million hours of official time use, a 28.2% decrease over FY 2016.
What is Official Time?
Official time is time given to a federal employee to work on behalf of a federal employee union while continuing to receive full employee salary and benefits.
OPM describes official time as:
“Official time,” as authorized by 5 U.S.C. § 7131, is paid time spent by Federal employees performing representational work for a bargaining unit in lieu of their regularly assigned work. In other words, the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) has equated official time to be the same as work time or hours of work.
How Much Does Official Time Cost Taxpayers?
The short answer to that question is that no one really knows.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has tracked official time in reports over the years and found reporting to be inaccurate. Some examples:
In testimony provided to Congress in 1996, Timothy Bowling, GAO’s Associate Director for Federal Management and Workforce Issues, said:
We know that using official time for various union activities is an established practice at the four entities we examined, and we can report certain relevant statistics that each of these entities made available to us, but we found that these statistics are limited in what they tell us. Within these entities, insufficient data exist on the amount of official time used for union activities, the cost of the time, and the number of people using that time to draw broad conclusions. Nor can we legitimately compare one agency’s figures with another’s, or extrapolate to the larger federal universe.
The testimony concludes by saying:
In summary, Mr. Chairman, we found limitations in recordkeeping and reporting among the four entities we examined. We also found that no reporting requirement exists to ensure that agencies generate comprehensive data on their support of union activities. If decisionmakers hope to resolve the question of the extent to which federal taxpayers subsidize the activities of federal employee unions, better data are needed on (1) the amount and cost of the hours used for union activities, as well as the number of employees using those hours; (2) the types of activities covered by the hours used; and (3) the overall costs of agencies’ support for union activities. Recognizing that data gathering can be expensive, we believe that decisionmakers would need to balance the costs and benefits of the various options for doing so.
In 2014, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report in which it analyzed how OPM calculates official time.
Regarding its data analysis, GAO had this to say:
GAO found that its cost estimate for these 6 agencies yielded an estimate that was about $5 million more than the estimate using OPM’s methodology ($61 million versus $56 million, or a difference of about 9 percent). Further, cost estimates using GAO’s methodology at 4 of the 6 agencies were higher by 15 percent or more than the estimates using OPM’s methodology. A government-wide cost estimate could be higher or lower if this methodology was applied to all agencies. OPM said reporting on official time is not a priority at this time and they have used the same methodology for preparing its cost estimate since fiscal year 2002. Use of other methodologies may result in a more representative estimate of actual cost.
To be fair, since the report was published, OPM has since implemented all three of GAO’s recommendations from the report.
In 2017, a GAO report analyzing official time at the VA said, “The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) cannot accurately track the amount of work time employees spend on union representational activities, referred to as official time, agency-wide because it does not have a standardized way for its facilities to record and calculate official time.”
Again, to be fair, the VA has implemented each of GAO’s recommendations from the report since it was issued.
Further compounding the past problems with data accuracy is that the reports that OPM has historically published were eliminated by the Biden administration in 2021, so there has been no record of official time since the last report was issued for fiscal year 2019. However, OPM announced recently that it intends to resume publication of the reports and has begun the data gathering process.
The broader point, however, is that tracking official time data and costs has historically been unreliable at best. Lawmakers such as Lee and Cline look at the situation and conclude that it’s an example of wasteful spending by the government for which taxpayers are on the hook and have concluded the practice should be abolished.
