By Scott Kupor, Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management
February 4, 2026

When Americans think about how their tax dollars are spent, they (hopefully) imagine funding to keep our country safe and government services running well. What they likely don’t imagine is hundreds of millions of dollars going toward years-long negotiations over office moves, work procedures, or internal management decisions.

Yet that’s exactly what our latest report shows.

In Fiscal Year 2024 alone, federal agencies reported over $180 million in taxpayer-funded collective bargaining expenses. That includes not just arbitration fees and administrative costs, but the salaries and benefits of federal employees whose time is consumed by negotiating and administering collective bargaining agreements.

This isn’t about questioning the value of a professional civil service. Federal employees already operate under some of the strongest workplace protections in the country, enshrined in statute and reinforced by decades of policy. But collective bargaining in the federal sector sits on top of those protections, creating an additional and extremely costly layer of process.

What makes this especially troubling is how inefficient the system has become.

Federal-sector collective bargaining routinely stretches on for years. Agencies devote enormous staff time to negotiations that often have little to do with pay or benefits, because those aren’t negotiable under federal law. Instead, bargaining focuses on the “impact and implementation” of management decisions: reorganizations, reductions in force, office relocations, disciplinary procedures, and changes to how work gets done.

In other words, we spend vast sums negotiating how agencies can manage their workforce, not whether employees are treated fairly or paid appropriately.

The report also makes clear this is not a marginal activity. Some federal employees spend more than 50% and, in some cases, even 100% of their work time on union duties, all at taxpayer expense.

This should give everyone pause.

Every dollar spent on prolonged bargaining is a dollar not spent on mission execution. Every hour devoted to negotiating procedures is an hour not spent improving outcomes for the American people.

Agencies must understand the true costs of collective bargaining, evaluate whether these resources are being used wisely, and ask whether the current system serves American taxpayers.

A strong civil service and responsible stewardship of public funds are not competing values. But achieving both requires confronting inefficiencies that have gone unexamined for far too long.

The American people deserve a federal government that is focused on results, not one buried under layers of costly and ineffective process.