Written by Marsha Blackburn
U.S. Senator
Washington, D.C. – Since Inauguration Day, President Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans have been hard at work eliminating waste, reining in bureaucracy, and making government accountable to We the People. And so far, we’ve had a lot of success.
To date, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has identified $115 billion in potential savings for American taxpayers—on everything from federal leases for empty office buildings to millions in anti-American DEI programs.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has worked to shrink the size of the federal government, which numbers 2.4 million employees at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Just on Thursday, the President signed an executive order to shut down the Department of Education, freeing up resources from the department’s bureaucracy to go directly to schools, students, and families.
As we work to “DOGE” the government, however, we still face some challenges. And at the top of the list are federal labor unions.
For years, federal labor unions have secured collective bargaining agreements with federal agencies, obtaining taxpayer-funded benefits for their members without any consideration of merit or job performance. In effect, these unions harm productivity, increase labor costs, and reduce investment—all on the taxpayer’s dime.
During the final weeks of the Joe Biden administration, for example, the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 federal workers, secured an agreement with the Social Security Administration allowing employees to work remotely for at least two days a week, with some working fully remote.
Since President Trump’s inauguration, meanwhile, federal labor unions have led the fight against the President’s efforts to rightsize the government. Last month, federal labor unions, including the National Federation of Federal Employees and National Treasury Employees Union, sued the Trump administration to block it from reducing the size of our bloated federal workforce. At the same time, unions have fought President Trump’s executive order requiring federal employees to return to the office full-time.
To make matters worse, while putting members’ interests ahead of the American people, these labor organizations are directly subsidized by taxpayers. The government, for example, deducts membership dues from employees’ taxpayer-funded paychecks. In addition, many federal employees are allowed to focus on union issues during work hours—meaning hardworking Tennesseans and Americans are paying federal employees to not do their job.
Not only is this arrangement an abuse of taxpayer dollars, but it can also have serious security risks. At the Transportation Security Administration, more employees work on union matters than screening passengers at 86 percent of U.S. airports. Almost 200 TSA employees work full-time on union issues.
Thankfully, the Trump administration recently ended collective bargaining agreements with all TSA officers. But with a quarter of federal employees in unions, there is much more that needs to be done to hold them accountable.
That’s why Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) and I recently introduced the Federal Workforce Freedom Act, which would put a stop to all collective bargaining agreements between federal agencies and labor unions. Among its provisions, this legislation would prohibit federal employees from participating in labor unions for the purposes of collective bargaining, ban federal agencies from engaging in collective bargaining negotiations, and immediately terminate all collective bargaining agreements.
In November, voters made their voices clear: Government should protect the interests of the American people—not the Washington Swamp. By taking back control of our federal agencies from unions, we can help ensure that happens.
