OPINION:
President Trump is uprooting the mechanisms Democrats deployed to enhance their political power with taxpayer funds. In a recent presidential memorandum, the president asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the misuse of federal grants for political purposes.
A sophisticated inquiry is required because nongovernmental organizations often employ complex structures that launder through subgrantees the ultimate destination of Uncle Sam’s cash. With public sector unions, however, the politicization is overt.
Since 1990, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have distributed $274 million in state and local employee dues to Democratic candidates for Congress and the White House.
Taking advantage of its affiliates, the American Federation of Government Employees converted federal salaries into $75 million for left-wing political donations and lobbying. These outfits have also been running to Democratic-appointed federal judges with lawsuits designed to block everything the administration is trying to achieve.
It’s a perversion of the public purse that Mr. Trump has tried to reverse by eliminating the public sector unions’ most potent weapon: collective bargaining. With an executive order issued on the eve of Labor Day, Mr. Trump cited national security authorities to exclude several government agencies from using employment contracts signed under the previous administration to thwart the priorities of the new one.
“Certain procedural requirements in Federal labor-management relations can create delays in agency operations. These delays can impact the ability of agencies with national security responsibilities to implement policies swiftly and fulfill their critical missions,” the White House explained.
The new designations apply to employees of NASA, the National Weather Service, the Patent Office, the Bureau of Reclamation and what’s left of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. These entities now share the same status stopping G-men from forming a picket line around the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
Last month, attorneys for the Federal Education Association — an affiliate of the NEA representing Defense Department educators — persuaded one of President Clinton’s judicial choices to approve a preliminary injunction restoring collective bargaining. The ruling ignored a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals mandate overturning an identical, partisan injunction involving other federal agencies.
The far-left Center for American Progress calculated that Mr. Trump’s actions earlier this year had already taken collective bargaining away from 1 million federal employees at a dozen agencies. For instance, the blue-gloved inspectors at the Transportation Security Administration were excluded in March.
When Congress created the TSA after the 9/11 attacks, Democrats insisted their only intention was stopping bad guys, not adding 40,000 government workers to the dole. That was a lie. Despite spending $165 billion over two decades, TSA’s security theater has yet to foil a single terrorist.
This administration cares only about delivering results, and that’s why it shows a preference for helping the productive sector of the economy, even if that disrupts the comfy arrangements the public sector has traditionally enjoyed. So far, the jobs outlook is improving.
Private companies are growing and hiring more U.S. citizens, with 2.4 million private sector jobs created since January. Wages rose 1.4%, finally beating the inflation rate with real growth.
The White House boasts it has done more for workers in six months than the prior administration did in four years. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act instituted no tax on tips or overtime, and it provided a 15% average tax cut to most earners.
If public sector employees don’t like these changes, the private sector is hiring.
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