Unionized workers at the Defense Health Agency, tasked with overseeing benefits for US troops, spent 87,000 hours (and $3.3 million) during fiscal 2023 and 2024 doing union work instead of their actual jobs.
You read that right: 87,000 hours.
That’s equivalent to 3,625 days, almost a full man-hour decade.
Burned up by staffers tending to their own interests, to the detriment of the troops they’re nominally charged with helping and the taxpayers they’re answerable to: They spent those hours doing things like contract renegotiation and fringe-benefit squeeze-outs.
This info comes in a bombshell new report unearthed by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), a veteran and a fierce advocate for the troops as well as a staunch fighter against fraud and waste as head of the Senate DOGE caucus.
Good: The more sunlight into government spending, the better.
Otherwise, there’s no way to ever know which handouts serve to advance America’s national interest and which line the pockets of powerful fiefdoms and their lords.
But it points to a bigger problem, i.e., that public-sector unions are bad news for everyone.
In the private sector, unionized workers use their collective power to win concessions from business owners. If that gums up the works too much, the company suffers and its customers and investors go elsewhere.
Government doesn’t work that way: The dissatisfied can’t escape so easily, and it’s politicians and other officials with no personal skin in the game who make the concessions.
And unionized government workers put the squeeze directly on you.
Every benefit, every pay hike, every extra comes out of the taxpayer’s pocket.
And by shielding the incompetent and criminal, stifling innovation and generally gumming up the works, public-sector unions screw over the people most dependent on government services.
That is, the poor, the disabled and the otherwise marginalized.
Even, in this case, the armed forces.
So the next time National Education Association head Becky Pringle starts in on one of her semi-comprehensible tirades about justice and equity, or any other municipal, state or federal public-union muckamuck throws a weepy, righteous temper tantrum — remember.
The only thing they want is to shove their hand deeper into your pocket.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
