{"id":1534058,"date":"2025-05-04T22:05:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T02:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1534058"},"modified":"2025-05-04T22:05:00","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T02:05:00","slug":"egregious-senate-doge-caucus-leader-uncovers-federal-employees-cashing-taxpayer-checks-while-doing-union-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/egregious-senate-doge-caucus-leader-uncovers-federal-employees-cashing-taxpayer-checks-while-doing-union-work\/1534058\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Egregious’: Senate DOGE Caucus Leader Uncovers Federal Employees Cashing Taxpayer Checks While Doing Union Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘Egregious’: Senate DOGE Caucus Leader Uncovers Federal Employees Cashing Taxpayer Checks While Doing Union Work<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), chairwoman of the Senate DOGE Caucus, slammed the U.S. government this week for shelling out taxpayer dollars to employees who are busy doing union work instead of serving the American people.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sen. Joni Ernst discusses DOGE<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

In fiscal year 2019, the Office of Personnel Management reported<\/a> that federal employees spent 2.6 million hours on union activities, costing taxpayers $135 million. The Biden administration temporarily halted OPM’s data reporting, but the Trump administration resumed it after a request from Ernst.<\/p>\n

\u201cThrough the course of the past 10 years and studying government efficiency and fraud, waste, and abuse, we have uncovered the issue of taxpayer-funded union time.<\/strong> It\u2019s where we see federal employees\u2014and they can legally do this right now\u2014work during their regular workday, and do that as taxpayer-funded dollars going to their paycheck, but they\u2019re not actually working on their duties as a federal employee,\u201d Enrst said during a panel discussion on government bureaucracy at the The Hill & Valley Forum this week. \u201cWhat they\u2019re doing is working for their union, maybe to increase their wages or increase their benefits, on the taxpayers\u2019 dime.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Ernst also sounded off on “egregious” examples of federal employee misconduct. <\/strong>\u201cFederal employees who were caught, you know, one taking a bubble bath when he was on a Zoom call with other employees\u2014he got ratted out, of course. Those that are on the golf course, we get those all the time,\u201d senator said. Even more shocking cases included a HUD employee who was in prison for driving drunk during work hours, unbeknownst to her supervisor, and a remote worker who ran a full-time business while his mother answered his work emails.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomehow her supervisor did not know she was in jail,<\/strong>\u201d she explained about the HUD employee, adding, \u201cAnd one of the most egregious was one federal employee that was working remotely that had started his own business, full-time business, and during the work hours, his mother was responding to his emails.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last month, Ernst introduced<\/a> the\u00a0Taxpayer-Funded Union Time Transparency Act<\/em>\u00a0to revealed just how much federal employee unions are subsidized by tax dollars after the Biden administration paused the public release of the figures. Rep. Scott Franklin (R-FL) introduced companion legislation in the House of Representatives.<\/p>\n

“Taxpayers shouldn\u2019t pay for empty federal office buildings or for federal employees to unionize on the clock. <\/strong>It\u2019s just common sense \u2014 Americans deserve a full, detailed account of how bureaucrats use both their official time and office space for union-related work,\u201d\u00a0said<\/a> Rep. Franklin.\u00a0\u201cThis is exactly the kind of waste and abuse my friend, Senator Joni Ernst, and I are fighting to root out alongside the Trump Administration. The President was right to order federal employees back to the office \u2014but if taxpayers are footing the bill, workers must be accountable for how they spend their official time.<\/strong>“<\/p>\n

As Ernst and her DOGE caucus colleagues continue in exposing waste and abuse across the federal government, the success of Elon Musk\u2019s cost-cutting initiative hinges<\/a> on whether Congress will approve President Donald Trump\u2019s budget, which aims to make these reductions permanent.<\/p>\n

In March, President Donald Trump threw his support<\/a> behind a rescission package to implement major spending cuts spearheaded by DOGE. \u201cIt would be great. I think we\u2019re going to do that,\u201d Trump told reporters.<\/strong><\/p>\n

According to a memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) obtained by the\u00a0New York Post<\/a>, the administration is pushing two proposals to slash $9.3 billion. \u201cThe first includes a rescission of $8.3 billion in wasteful foreign aid spending (out of $22 billion) that does not expire in Fiscal Year (FY) 2025. The second is a separate rescission of all Federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) \u2014 which funds the politically biased public radio and public television system,\u201d the\u00a0Post<\/a>\u00a0said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nSun, 05\/04\/2025 – 18:05<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/political\/egregious-senate-doge-caucus-leader-uncovers-federal-employees-cashing-taxpayer-checks<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Egregious’: Senate DOGE Caucus Leader Uncovers Federal Employees Cashing Taxpayer Checks While Doing Union Work Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), chairwoman of the Senate DOGE Caucus,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1534059,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1534058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1534058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1534059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1534058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1534058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1534058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}