Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the The Daily Wire. The author of this post is Luke Rosiak.
The House's oversight commitee on Friday asked the largest union of federal employees to produce documents showing its communications with the Biden administration resulting in union contracts designed to bind President Donald Trump throughout his term.
The letter comes as Trump sent a memo to agency heads aimed at unwinding union contracts that were finalized in the final 30 days of the Biden presidency and setting a policy that such contracts should not be entered into in the final month of any president's term.
Reps. James Comer (R-KY), chair of the Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, and Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA), its DOGE subcommittee chair, wrote the American Federation of Government Employees President Everett Kelley that the panel was investigating the
"use-and abuse-of the federal collective bargaining process."
The Department of Education signed a contract locking in telework on January 27, 2025, just three days before Trump took office. Biden Education Department officials signed the contract even though they admitted that the union had hamstrung the Biden administration's own desire to bring the workforce back into the office, with COVID years in the past.
"Nearly all of ED's 4,245 employees are telework eligible and they only spend 43.4 percent of their working hours in the office. Further, 2,341 ED employees are completely remote, never showing up to the office. When the Biden-Harris Administration attempted to increase the federal workforce's in-person work, ED struggled to bring its employees back to the office, citing CBA [collective bargaining agreement] negotiations as the 'largest barrier the agency faces to completing execution,'" the letter, first obtained by The Daily Wire, said.
"On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order requiring the 'heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch ... to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis.' CBAs entered into by the outgoing Administration with AFGE should not undermine President Trump's ability to bring the federal workforce back to the office to better serve the American people," it continued.
The letter demanded that AFGE produce all contracts signed in 2024 or January 2025, and all correspondence with the Biden administration about them.
"This process was used extensively toward the end of the Biden-Harris Administration to negotiate collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) intended primarily, not to manage the workforce under its own watch, but to constrain the ability of President Donald Trump to do so. The Biden-Harris Administration's CBAs unduly infringe on President Trump's ability to exercise his broad authority to oversee the federal workforce and ensure the laws of the land are faithfully executed," Greene said in a statement.
Trump's memo said
"In the final days of the prior administration's tenure, it purposefully finalized collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) with Federal employees in an effort to harm my Administration by extending its wasteful and failing policies beyond its time in office... Such last-minute, lame-duck CBAs, which purport to bind a new President to his predecessor's policies, run counter to America's system of democratic self-government."
"The Supreme Court has explained that a President 'cannot choose to bind his successors by diminishing their powers,'" it added.
"To the extent that subordinate agency personnel have executed a CBA that violates the requirements of subsection (a) of this section, but the applicable agency head has not yet approved such agreement pursuant to 5 U.S.C. 7114(c), such agency head shall promptly disapprove such agreement as inconsistent with the requirements of this memorandum."
Union contracts were designed as adversarial documents negotiated between management and labor, but there is evidence that in the Biden administration, both sides were representing government employees, with no one defending the interests of taxpayers and recipients of services. They were not willing to run the agencies under the constraints of the contracts, but instead signed them on the way out the door, binding the Trump administration.
Biden's Social Security Commissioner, Martin O'Malley, notoriously signed a five-year contract locking in telework on November 27. The memo from Trump, which he is expected to sign as soon as Friday afternoon, is rumored to cover contracts signed in the last 30 days of a presidency, so it is unclear whether that agreement would be lifted.
The Daily Wire revealed that O'Malley flew to Florida to drink and party with the Social Security union, then signed the five-year telework contract hours before resigning his job to run for the Democratic National Committee, where the favor to unions could help his chances.
A slew of other agencies signed contracts with AFGE in the waning months of Biden's presidency, The Daily Wire found. For example, on December 18, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission signed a five-year contract that says employees can come into the office as little as two days a week.
"The employer, in consultation with the union, shall maintain a Telework Program in every EEOC Office... All EEOC positions are eligible for some amount of telework," it says.
On December 3, 2024, the National Park Services signed a contract with two unions representing Washington, D.C.-based employees that would also, coincidentally, run through the entirety of the Trump administration. One of the unions said to expect
"virtually all NPS positions" to be
"eligible for telework," with no requirement to come in more than once a week.
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