Chairman Comer Slams Democrats’ Pro–Union Boss Bill Blocking Trump’s Workforce Accountability Reforms

WASHINGTON— House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) today criticized Democrats for seeking to advance H.R. 2550, a pro–union boss bill that would prevent President Donald Trump from carrying out his agenda to bring federal workers back to the office, reform the bureaucracy, and restore accountability across the federal workforce.

Below are Chairman Comer’s prepared remarks.

Americans pay several hundred billion in taxes each year to fund the salaries and benefits of more than two million federal civilian employees. These workers are paid to carry out the critical mission and functions of the federal government.

But the more than 340 million Americans who foot the bill do not directly manage federal Executive Branch employees. They elect a President to do that.  

The President directs the workforce of the Executive Branch so he can fulfill his Constitutional duty to ensure the laws of the land are faithfully executed.

When President Trump ran for office last year, he told the American public that, if elected, he would return federal employees to their offices, reform the bureaucracy, and restore much-needed accountability to the workforce.

The American people chose to elect him to do just that.

But even before President Trump took office, federal collective bargaining legal authorities were weaponized to sabotage what Americans had voted for. 

On their way out the door, lame-duck Biden Administration officials signed collective bargaining agreements with federal employee union bosses specifically designed to tie the hands of the incoming President Trump.

In January, at our very first hearing this Congress, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform heard testimony from President Biden’s Social Security Commissioner, Martin O’Malley. He cut a deal with union bosses after the November election—and just before leaving the agency to run for chair of the Democratic National Committee. The deal locked in telework levels for tens of thousands of Social Security Administration employees for the entirety of the incoming Trump Administration.

To be clear, this was done specifically to “Trump-proof” the workforce—to force the incoming President to continue the failed management policies the public had just voted to end. 

So we must ask: Are we going to uphold the President’s Constitutional role as head of the Executive Branch?  

Can he truly lead if he is held hostage by union deals to which he never agreed and were intended to undermine his authority?  

Should an elected President be unable to bring taxpayer-funded federal employees back to work for his entire four-year term?

The American people do not think so. 

That is why the House Oversight Committee adopted legislation that would allow the President to manage the workforce without being bound by last-minute union agreements designed to undermine him. 

That legislation, the “Preserving Presidential Management Authority Act” sponsored by Representative Cloud of Texas, is the bill we should be debating here today.

It is important to remember that public sector unions are fundamentally different from their private sector counterparts.

In fact, none other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt—a major champion of private sector unions—believed that public sector unions made no sense. 

FDR wrote that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”

Why? 

Because in the private sector, unions represent workers and sit across the bargaining table from representatives of business owners. 

However, federal unions are not negotiating with a profit-seeking corporation. They are negotiating with the public’s elected representatives.

As FDR put it, in the case of the public sector “[t]he employer is the whole people.”

Federal unions, in other words, seek concessions not from private owners but from the taxpayers themselves.

And since federal salaries and benefits are determined by laws, which also establish basic civil service protections for employees, what exactly do federal unions bargain over? They bargain over other “conditions of employment”—like telework. 

Unions also seek contract provisions that limit management’s ability to hold employees accountable through disciplinary procedures or performance management processes. 

I urge my colleagues to buck federal union bosses, put Americans first, and oppose the so-called “Protect America’s Workforce Act.”