The Biden administration took down a federal webpage that focused on keeping unions transparent and accountable, and they don’t seem to have plans to put it back up.
Last week, 10 Senate Republicans asked the federal government’s HR agency to explain why a webpage with historical reports on using official time at federal agencies was removed. The page mysteriously disappeared in 2023.
An OPM spokesperson said the reports were removed from the agency’s website due to a redesign, but they didn’t mention if or when they might be available again. For now, people can request copies of past reports.
After the page disappeared last year, the spokesperson said that the “old reports on official time” weren’t available because the website was reorganized to make it easier to use. Their recent response to lawmakers repeated this claim.
The OPM originally made the webpage to track “official time.” Official time is when federal employees who are part of a union do union work during their regular work hours. Taxpayers fund this official time.
This practice has been around for decades, but lawmakers wanted more information due to concerns about misuse. Until last year, OPM had a webpage with reports to keep track of official time.
“Official time” became policy in 1978, but there were immediate concerns about tracking it to stop its potential abuse.
In 1979, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that “no one knows how much official time is allowed for federal employees” because record-keeping was poor. The GAO made similar comments again to Congress in 1996.
In response, the OPM began keeping track of official time for the public to view. OPM has been regularly releasing these reports since the Clinton administration, but in the letter, they noted that they aren’t legally required to do so.
However, the history of reports on official time is complicated. Only two of these reports were required by law. The 1998 report was created because Congress required it for one year in a fiscal appropriations law. The 2019 report came from a controversial executive order by then-President Trump that limited access to official time. The Biden administration has since canceled this order.
In its letter to lawmakers, OPM now says it moved the official time data to an “agency reports” webpage. However, the most recent agency report is from 2019, meaning there haven’t been any new updates since Biden took office. No other reports appear on the current OPM webpage.
The letter also claimed that outside groups, such as federal unions and the White House, didn’t influence their decision.
However, a national labor union representing over 100,000 federal employees boasted in an online document that it had convinced the Biden administration to use taxpayer money to make it easier for unions to recruit new members.
Max Nelsen from the Freedom Foundation said that despite OPM’s initial response, their website changes have stopped years of online tracking of how unions use taxpayer money. The reports from previous years also disappeared from the website. Nelsen said that OPM has not only tried to hide official government reports showing the cost of union work done by federal employees but has also blocked attempts to find out why the webpage was removed.
Nelsen added that OPM hasn’t shared any new estimates of official time use during this administration, likely because any new report would show the costs of taxpayer-funded union work “rising as quickly as grocery prices” for Americans.
“OPM’s conduct demonstrates its contempt for American taxpayers and its disregard of even the most minimal obligations of transparent government,” Nelson said.
Nelson disagrees with OPM’s excuse of designing a better website. He said he doesn’t understand how removing the only place where official time information and historical data were kept helped the public access that information. He pointed out that the website worked well and had up-to-date information until it was taken down last summer.
Now, Americans will not have an easy way to track the hours lawmakers claim to use as “official time.” The OPM points out that the reports can be found via search engines, but that seems like far too much work for the average American with a short attention span—and that seems to be what OPM is counting on.
