Comer, Greene demand Biden halt plans to Trump-proof government

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and fellow GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene are calling on federal agencies to stop negotiating collective bargaining agreements with the Biden administration, arguing that doing so will kneecap the incoming Trump White House. 

President Biden’s team has spent the waning weeks of his time in office negotiating or extending union deals that the lawmakers say cede “presidential authority to run the federal government to union allies.” 

Mr. Comer of Kentucky and Ms. Greene of Georgia sent 24 letters to federal agencies on Friday demanding an end to the dealmaking.  

“By employing these short-term tactics to Trump-proof federal agencies, the Biden-Harris administration apparently did not consider — or perhaps did not care — that this abuse of labor law will further convince the public that the civil service considers itself beyond the reach of accountability,” they wrote. 

In April, the Office of Personnel Management released a rule that restricted executive discretion over the classification of federal employee positions, which the lawmakers argued prevented “potential actions by a future administration.” 

One of the recent deals the lawmakers pointed out in their letters was struck by Social Security Administration head Martin O’Malley with the American Federation of Government Employees, locking in 42,000 positions at the agency, or 70% of the SSA’s workforce, to work from home until 2029. 

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to see federal workers return to the office. His new Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, has pledged to trim costs by nixing telework.

Mr. Comer aims to go so far as to create a DOGE subcommittee, which will be chaired in the next Congress by Ms. Greene. 

Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy met with the duo, along with a slew of other congressional Republicans, to lay out their vision for DOGE’s interaction with Washington and for where lawmakers can trim spending.

The Comer-Greene letters follow a report from Sen. Joni Ernst, Iowa Republican, released this week that found that just 6% of the federal workforce is showing up daily for a full day’s work.

Mr. Comer and Ms. Greene contended that the deals made by the outgoing administration wouldn’t end when Mr. Trump assumes power and that they were designed to “protect the outgoing administration’s policies from being overturned and to prevent a future administration from exercising independent management judgment.”

The lawmakers added, “To prevent further inhibition of the incoming president’s ability to fulfill his mandate, we strongly urge the Biden-Harris administration to cease negotiating or extending collective bargaining agreements with respect to a workforce it will have no responsibility to manage going forward.”