Unionized employees at the Internal Revenue Service devoted 521,725 hours of work time, at a cost of $23.5 million, exclusively on labor activities last year, prompting a House watchdog to charge that the IRS is ripping off the nation’s taxpayers.
The $23.5 million in salary and benefits in fiscal 2013, which ran from October 2012 to September 2013, was significantly above fiscal year 2012’s $16 million and means the IRS spent about $321 per employee on union activities such as protecting workers from bullying bosses.
The Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS, compiled figures on the 73,000 IRS employees in National Treasury Employees Union for the House Ways and Means Committee. The department’s report, provided exclusively to Secrets, was met with outrage in Congress, which is already probing the agency’s targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups.
“The IRS has wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and over a half a million employee hours for union activities. It is absurd the IRS has the audacity to habitually come to this committee asking for more money,” House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany, R-La., told Secrets.
Union work, or “official time,” is allowed under federal law. “Official time is a means of improving the workplace and work processes,” said NTEU National President Colleen M. Kelley. Treasury is the only federal agency with its own union.
The IRS, a big agency with a $12 billion budget, said simply that the union is “entitled to use official time to represent an agency’s bargaining unit employees.”
ELIZABETH WARREN CAN’T TOUCH HILLARY CLINTON
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s favorable rating among Democrats has hit a sky-high 85 percent, a big blow to potential challenger Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who remains unknown to most, according to a new poll.
The latest Economist/YouGov poll finds that 49 percent don’t know who the Massachusetts senator is. “Warren has a long way to go to become anywhere near as popular with Democrats as the former first lady,” said pollster Kathy Frankovic.
Despite vowing not to run, Warren has been touted as a liberal-progressive alternative to the more “moderate” Clinton, but she lacks Clinton’s wide popularity among Democrats.
For example, 69 percent of Democrats want Clinton to run while only 23 percent want Warren in the race. And 78 percent of Democrats feel Clinton has the qualifications to be president. It’s just 31 percent for Warren.
‘IMPEACH OBAMA’ MOVE GAINS SPEED
The underground effort by some conservatives to impeach President Obama for picking and choosing which laws to enforce is about to shift into a higher gear with a new book from a noted terrorism prosecutor alleging seven impeachable offenses on actions ranging from immigration to Benghazi and Obamacare.
In Faithless Execution, Andrew C. McCarthy makes the legal case to dump the president, but also hopes to build the political will in Congress and the nation to take the unusual move last used against former President Bill Clinton following the Monica Lewinsky affair.
“You have to make the public case that the president has to be removed,” said McCarthy. “I’m trying to make it.”
POLITICAL HELP FOR GAS TAX ADVOCATES
Armed with new reports showing that the nation’s highways have become one big pothole, advocates for a 10-cent gas tax are pledging to come to the political aid of lawmakers who jump on the fix-it bandwagon.
An unusual coalition including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO and the travel industry is using the start of the summer vacation driving season to spark a last-ditch campaign for road taxes and passage of the highway bill languishing in Congress.
As part of the effort, the groups are quietly offering to go to bat for lawmakers, especially anti-tax Republicans fearful that they will be hit for approving taxes.
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, now part of the group Building America’s Future, told Secrets that the Chamber would help Republicans with ads and donations and the AFL-CIO would aid Democrats. His message: “Don’t be afraid. It’s OK.”
Former Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood said that part of the effort will be to warn the nation how bad roads, airports and ports will get without funding. The harsh winter, he said, “has created an America that’s one big pothole.” His message: “We need more revenue.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
