Washington Cancelled Collective Bargaining Over Its Cost. The Bill Came Later.

On March 27, 2025, the President signed Executive Order 14251, excluding dozens of federal agencies and subdivisions from the statute that lets their employees bargain collectively at all.▸ Counted directly from the order's own text, it names at least 41 agencies and subdivisions — the Department of Veterans Affairs, most of the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, the EPA, the FDA, the CDC, twelve components of the Department of Homeland Security, and more. A second order five months later, Executive Order 14343, added further exclusions, including the National Weather Service. The stated rationale, repeated by agencies as they acted on it, was cost and efficiency: taxpayer money spent on "union business" instead of the agency's mission.

Here is what that money actually was, in the government's own numbers — published after the fact.

The Office of Personnel Management's supplemental report — the first governmentwide tally of its kind — found that federal agencies spent $181.6 million on collective bargaining in fiscal year 2024.▸ Fifty-four of the 67 agencies covered filed data, representing 89% of the federal bargaining-unit workforce; two agencies filed nothing at all.

Personnel compensation — agency and union staff paid to negotiate, process grievances, and resolve disputes — accounted for $131.4 million, or 72.3% of the total.▸ The single largest line item, at nearly $58 million, wasn't negotiating new contracts at all; it was mediation, arbitration, and impasse resolution — the cost of disputes under agreements already in force. Non-personnel costs added another $50.2 million, including $22.6 million in free office space handed to unions and $11.5 million in penalties and settlements paid out over labor disputes.

That $181.6 million total is new.▸ But OPM had already published a related, narrower number seven months earlier: its FY2024 report on "official time" — the paid hours federal employees spend on union representational work instead of their assigned jobs. That report found 3.24 million hours of official time used governmentwide in FY2024, up 24.3% from 2.61 million hours in FY2019.

The cost of those hours grew even faster than the hours themselves: salary and benefits paid for official time rose 53.75%, from $134.99 million to $207.54 million, over the same five years — more than twice the rate at which hours grew.▸ That same OPM report also counted the workforce those hours belonged to: 1,381,300 federal employees sat in union bargaining units governmentwide in FY2024 (not counting the Postal Service), up 3.9% from 1,329,222 in FY2019.

That was the population Executive Order 14251 was written to shrink.▸ The Department of Veterans Affairs moved first and hardest: on August 6, 2025, VA terminated its contracts with AFGE, NAGE, NFFE, NNOC/NNU, and SEIU for "most" of its bargaining-unit employees, exempting only the roughly 4,000 police officers, firefighters, and security guards the order doesn't reach. VA's own justification cited the same kind of number this piece is built on: in 2024, it said, "over 1,900 VA bargaining-unit employees spent more than 750,000 hours of work on taxpayer funded union time," and more than 187,000 square feet of VA office and clinical space was in use by union representatives, rent-free.

What VA's announcement did not have — because it did not yet exist — was the governmentwide number this article opens with.▸ OPM's own supplemental report says so explicitly: the $181.6 million figure reflects FY2024 activity, and Executive Orders 14251 and 14343 "do not impact the information contained in this report." OPM didn't finish implementation guidance for the two orders until February 12, 2026 — the same month the cost report finally shipped, eleven months after the first order, six months after VA had already acted on it.

Figures cover different fiscal-year populations reported by different OPM studies — the FY2024 collective-bargaining expense report (54 of 67 agencies, 89% of the bargaining-unit population) and the FY2024 official time report (63 of 67 agencies, excluding the U.S. Postal Service) — and are not directly additive to one another.