Every wasteful government agency has politically connected interest groups that lobby Congress to keep it active, which is part of the reason why the Trump administration’s laudable “Department of Government Efficiency” efforts were not as successful as many had hoped.

Luke Rosiak, an investigative reporter with the Daily Wire, exposed how bad things had gotten. Just 60 FMCS employees worked out of a 9-story office tower in downtown DC, which they’d decked out in luxuries like private bathrooms, a full gym, and oil paintings of themselves. One FMCS commissioner had his home location listed in Iowa so that he could designate his time in Washington as a six-year long “business trip” and bill all his food and living expenses to the taxpayer.

Rosiak wrote: “FMCS seemed, quite clearly, to exist for the benefit of those on its payroll, and not much else. One employee told me: ‘Let me give you the honest truth: A lot of FMCS employees don’t do a hell of a lot, including myself. Personally, the reason that I’ve stayed is that I just don’t feel like working that hard, plus the location on K Street is great, plus we all have these oversized offices with windows, plus management doesn’t seem to care if we stay out at lunch a long time. Can you blame me?’”

I, for one, can blame FMCS’s employees for living large on the taxpayer’s dime, and apparently so could the Trump administration, which downsized FMCS to a skeletal staff via a March 2025 executive order. 

Congress should be working to finish the job by eliminating FMCS, but instead, a group of Republicans and Democrats are supporting legislation that would re-arm the agency with sweeping new powers.

The sponsors of the so-called “Faster Labor Contracts Act” say they want to reduce the time it takes for a union and an employer to sign a contract after a workplace first becomes unionized. Union contracts often take a long time to negotiate, because they fundamentally change every aspect of a workplace, and because getting them wrong can be disastrous for workers. Following the United Auto Workers’ new contract with the “Big Three” US automakers, motor vehicles and parts jobs are down by 72,800 after massive layoffs.

The Faster Labor Contracts Act doesn’t do anything to make union negotiations less complicated. Instead, it puts employers and union negotiators on a 90-day clock. When the clock expires, the government gets to step in and create its own “contract.”

After just 90 days of no agreement (on average, union contract negotiations take over a year), the FMCS gets to come in and “mediate” the negotiations for an additional 30 days. If the two parties don’t agree within that incredibly short time period, the FMCS can appoint a 3-member “arbitration” panel that gains the power to impose a set of terms that bind employers and employees for two years.

This creates a whole host of obvious problems. Federal arbiters know absolutely nothing about what’s good for an individual business and will rely on their own intuition to make guesses about what demands a business can handle. These arbiters would have no skin in the game: if they happen to propose the kind of contract that destroys a business and causes mass layoffs, it won’t be the arbiters losing a paycheck. A two-year, immovable agreement that doesn’t change as the economy changes could paralyze a company and put its workforce in jeopardy.

Even union proponents have struggled to understand how this kind of “binding arbitration” would benefit anyone. A machinists union organizer testifying before the Senate on proposed labor legislation was asked about binding arbitration, and he responded that the idea seemed to contradict “the whole point of a union” and amounted to “removing the democracy from the workplace.”

He’s on the right track, but he needs to take his logic even further. Right now, the biggest threat to “workplace democracy” is the fact that 95 percent of unionized workers never got a chance to vote on the union that claims to ‘represent’ them. Voluntary unionism, a system where the decision to join and give money to a union is entirely up to individual workers, is the ideal toward which policymakers should be aiming.

Most unionized workers support voluntarism — 79 percent of them support Right to Work laws that make union dues optional — but union elites, the far-left activists who work out of union headquarters in Washington D.C., don’t see it that way.

They like the idea of corrupt agencies like FMCS slapping binding two-year agreements onto employers, because in the 24 non-Right to Work states, union contracts usually require that workers pay compulsory dues and fees as a condition of their job. With union contracts in place, union officials can start collecting money from workers’ paychecks and spending it on politics, supporting the campaigns of the very politicians now calling for union contracts to be cemented “faster.”

That corrupt flow of campaign cash into Congress’s coffers is ultimately why, instead of being eliminated by DOGE, the FMCS is on track to be given a whole new set of powers.

New Jersey Democrat Donald Norcross recently filed a discharge petition on the Faster Labor Contracts Act. The petition will force the House to vote on the bill once it reaches 218 signatures. The bill can easily hit that target if all 214 House Democrats sign the petition, along with any four of the bill’s 17 Republican cosponsors.

Understanding a politician’s real priorities often requires zooming into these quiet battles over little-known agencies.

A STRAIT STILL CLOSED, A CEASEFIRE ALREADY BROKEN

Congressmen may have campaigned on fighting government waste, but those are just empty words if they go on to sign Rep. Norcross’s discharge petition and advance legislation that would undo the work of DOGE and empower corrupt federal bureaucrats to dictate the terms of labor contracts for private businesses across the country. The American people will be watching.

Jace White is the manager of government relations at Advancing American Freedom.