Twenty-six Immigration Court judges who are paid as government employees also spend a lot of their working hours at the Department of Justice, taking care of business for their federal employee union.
Their union — the National Association of Immigration Judges — wants the government to make their courts independent of the Justice Department.
Justice Department officials don’t like that idea, with one government lawyer reportedly saying “it would take significant resources to recreate a court system that is outside of the department.”
Even so, the $165,000-a-year judges are on the federal payroll under the government’s “official time” program, which enables them to do work for their union while hearing cases in the heavily backlogged system.
They are among 4,000 Justice Department employees who were on official time over the past four years, including 200 who spend 40 hours a week on union matters, according to official documents and data obtained by the Washington Examiner under the Freedom of Information Act.
The department refused to disclose the names of federal employees in data provided to the Examiner.
By comparison, the AFL-CIO, which has 11 million members, employs 459 people in its national headquarters.
Official time allows civil service employees to draw their tax-paid compensation while working part time or full time on union projects.
Civil service pay and benefits are set by Congress, so federal employee unions can only negotiate working conditions and represent employees in grievances.
But union representatives can also advocate for higher spending, more federal workers, and even expanded official time to enable more of their colleagues to do the same thing.
The number of employees within a federal department or agency who can be covered by official time and how many hours they can do so is also negotiable.
Justice Department employees drew $23 million in wages for 760,000 hours of union work — about 190,000 hours annually — under official time between 2009 and 2013. Other expenses, such as union-related travel and office supplies, are also paid by taxpayers.
At DOJ, official-time employees reported spending 100,000 hours working on grievances and 650,000 hours on “labor-management relations” — even though contract negotiations only take place every few years.
Besides the 26 immigration judges, the Examiner found 59 DOJ employees who were paid $124,000 or more while on official time, all in positions classified GS-14 or GS-15, two of the highest in the federal civil service system.
The largest single group among the 4,000 DOJ official-time workers are 204 federal corrections officers making up to $101,000 annually at the Butner Federal Correctional Institution in North Carolina.
There are also 21 “sports specialists” on official time at DOJ and a sewing machine repair supervisor who makes $64,000.
There are 17 human resources specialists — positions that are normally extensions of department management.
There’s even a DOJ chaplain who is paid $89,000 annually as a GS-12.
Earlier this year, the Examiner‘s “Too Big to Manage” series looked at official time across the government and found civil servants such as Phil Barbarello, who earns $166,000 a year at the Federal Aviation Administration.
Barbarello is an air traffic controller but spends all of his time working as a union vice president.
