The electorate voted overwhelmingly in support of taking the federal government in a new direction last month, but thanks to the undemocratic power of government unions, the new administration will be limited in its ability to deliver more efficient services for citizens.
In a last-second move designed to thwart the will of the voters, Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley, an appointee of President Joe Biden, signed a deal with the American Federation of Government Employees this week guaranteeing that the entity’s 42,000 SSA employee members will not have to come into the office when President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in.
Trump administration volunteers Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy previously pledged to make the federal government produce better services for taxpayers through their new “Department of Government Efficiency” initiative. Last month, the pair said, “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”
The new collective bargaining agreement signed in collusion between the Biden administration and the AFGE would thwart that effort, at least for those SSA employees covered by the contract. But the AFGE is the largest federal government union and it is pushing other Biden administration officials to sign similar agreements with their respective bargaining units.
The new privileges given by the Biden administration to government union members are above and beyond what is statutorily and regulatorily provided by the federal government’s civil service laws. Whatever objections the Trump administration may have with the civil service system, at least those protections were democratically created by an act of Congress, beginning specifically with the Civil Service Reform Act of 1863. And that is how a democratic government should set minimum work conditions for employees: through legislation.
The Democratic Party once understood this.
When President Franklin Roosevelt first signed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, it was Roosevelt himself who excluded government workers from collective bargaining privileges.
“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” Roosevelt wrote at the time.
“It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management,” he continued. “The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations.”
But that is exactly how the Biden administration is trying to abuse the collective bargaining process. They are signing collusive contracts with government unions to thwart Trump’s government efficiency agenda. It is a tactic that has hamstrung Democratic Party-controlled cities nationwide and made it impossible for these cities to be governed effectively.
The government union contract for the Camden, New Jersey, police department got so bad at one point that the mayor was forced to disband the entire city police force. He then had to create a brand new law enforcement agency from scratch at the county level with permission from the state. Trump may have to do something similar to assert control over the employees of federal agencies.
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If voters want government employees to make more money, they should vote for politicians who promise to increase government employee pay. But it makes no sense to allow government unions to collude with Democratic Party officials to set luxurious working conditions that make it impossible for leadership to reform nonproductive agencies. In the private sector, companies that sign bad contracts with their unions go out of business. But the federal government is a monopoly. If the SSA doesn’t deliver acceptable customer service, taxpayers have no place else to get their Social Security benefits.
Congress must work with the Trump administration to pass new laws explicitly barring government employees from signing collective bargaining agreements with government agencies. It is the only way any administration will be able to make the federal government efficient.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
