President Joe Biden has nixed a federal union accountability website despite his administration’s promises that it would be back.
Biden administration officials had previously said the site was simply being improved, but nearly all the accountability info from the site was removed and hasn’t returned.
“Federal union executives have taken advantage of the four years under the Biden administration, which adopted a ‘whole of government’ approach towards promoting and entrenching unions in the federal bureaucracy, to attempt to insulate themselves from a second Trump term,” Max Nelsen, a labor policy expert at the Freedom Foundation, told The Center Square.
As The Center Square previously reported, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management has for years updated a website to track union’s “official time.”
Official time is a practice protected by federal law that allows federal employees to do certain union activities while being paid by the federal government, and therefore, on the taxpayer dime.
To make sure that workers and unions do not abuse this provision, OPM has maintained a public accountability site tracking how that time has been used.
Biden’s administration removed the accountability website with promises to refurbish the online presence of the information.
In 2023, an OPM spokesperson told The Center Square that “previous reports on official time are not currently available because OPM is reorganizing our website to improve navigation and customer experience.”
Now, however, about two years later, the site is still gone. Lawmakers have blasted OPM for the change.
But the OPM says it has a new location online for reports. However, there is only one report on the new site, and it is from 2019, before Biden took office.
OPM told lawmakers in a letter first reported by The Center Square that it is not legally required to keep those kinds of records and publish reports.
“As part of modernizing and consolidating our webpages, we routinely remove or migrate information to ensure our web content is up to date and to improve the customer experience,” the letter said. “In the course of updating our website, official time reports were taken down from their original location. The most recent of those reports, from 2019, was migrated along with numerous other documents to the Agency Reports page of OPM’s website.”
Critics say it is about maintaining transparency.
“I am disappointed that OPM will not commit to publishing future reports critical to government oversight of taxpayer dollars,” U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., told The Center Square earlier this year. “Americans have a right to know if federal workers are using their hard-earned dollars responsibly and not to advance the interests of President Biden’s labor union cronies.”
Nelsen said his public information requests on the matter have not borne any fruit.
“Undoing Biden’s work will be difficult but, with an earlier start, President Trump may be able to have a more significant impact on reforming the federal bureaucracy than in his first term,” Nelsen said.
