Biden Administration Scrubs Union Accountability Site
2nd January 2025
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 unions’ “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 taxpayers’ dime.
To make sure that workers and unions do not abuse this provision, the 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 the OPM for the change.