DOGE shut down an agency where bureaucrats painted oil portraits of themselves on your dime.
Seventeen House Republicans just signed a bill to bring it back – with new powers to write labor contracts for every business in America.
What those contracts do to workers is something every union boss is counting on you not to find out.
The Government Waste DOGE Finally Killed
Sixty federal employees occupied a nine-story office tower on Washington's K Street – one of the most expensive corridors in the country.
They had private bathrooms, a full gym stocked with a $3,867 ice-maker, and oil paintings of themselves.
One top official used agency credit cards to buy champagne and $200 coasters for his office – and artwork painted by his wife.
Another had his official duty station listed as Iowa so that his daily presence in Washington counted as a six-year business trip, with every meal and rent payment reimbursed by the federal government.
Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak spent a year inside the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service and found one employee who said the quiet part out loud: "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."
No prosecutions followed Rosiak's original reporting – which triggered an FBI referral from the agency's own inspector general.
Barack Obama nominated one of the central figures in this scandal to run the place.
Trump responded differently.
In March 2025, a DOGE executive order reduced the FMCS to a skeleton crew of roughly a dozen employees.
The agency that once lived like royalty on your money was finished.
The Faster Labor Contracts Act Would Give It New Power
New Jersey Democrat Donald Norcross has filed a discharge petition on the Faster Labor Contracts Act, a bill with 17 Republican cosponsors.
Once the petition hits 218 signatures – requiring only four of those 17 Republicans to join every House Democrat – the bill bypasses Republican leadership and goes straight to the House floor for a vote.
The bill works like this: when workers vote to form a union, employers must begin negotiating within ten days.
If no contract is reached after 90 days, the FMCS steps in to mediate for another 30 days.
If the parties still cannot agree, the FMCS appoints a three-member arbitration panel that can impose a binding two-year contract on both sides.
On average, union contract negotiations take 458 days.
The Faster Labor Contracts Act compresses that process into 120 days – and then hands government bureaucrats the power to write the contract when the clock expires.
Those bureaucrats have no stake in the outcome.
If they impose a contract that drives a business into bankruptcy, it is not their paycheck that disappears.
The workers in that business will be bound to a two-year agreement that cannot change when the economy shifts, when inflation rises, when the company's fortunes turn.
Even a machinists union organizer who testified before the Senate on related legislation said the idea of binding arbitration contradicted "the whole point of a union" and amounted to "removing the democracy from the workplace."
Democrats and RINOs want to stack the board with Big Labor’s allies that will always side with the union.
How Compulsory Union Dues Flow Back to the Politicians Who Vote for Them
Here is what the Faster Labor Contracts Act actually is: a dues pipeline.
In the 24 non-right-to-work states, union contracts typically require workers to pay compulsory dues as a condition of employment.
When a binding contract gets imposed, union officials begin collecting from worker paychecks – automatically.
That money flows into political campaigns.
Those campaigns fund the politicians who are now rushing to sign Norcross's discharge petition.
The UAW's new contract with the Big Three automakers is the proof of concept.
The auto sector shed 72,800 jobs in the years that followed – and the workers losing those paychecks had no say in the contract that helped put them out of work.
The mechanism here is not subtle: Democrats need union money, union officials need federal arbiters to impose contracts, and the FMCS needs to exist to appoint those arbiters.
The corruption flows in one direction.
The 17 Republicans Who Just Sided with Big Labor Over DOGE
Every one of those 17 Republican cosponsors ran on cutting government waste.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Andrew Garbarino of New York is among the cosponsors.
They may have meant it when they said it.
What they are doing now tells you more.
Congress created the FMCS in 1947.
Only Congress can permanently shut it down.
Trump and DOGE did everything in their power to finish the job.
Republicans in Congress are about to undo it.
Sources:
- Jace White, "Congress is about to undo DOGE's biggest win," Washington Examiner, April 12, 2026.
- Luke Rosiak, "Inside The Now-Shuttered Federal Agency Where Employees Lived 'Like Reigning Kings,'" The Daily Wire, March 19, 2025.
- "H.R.5408 – Faster Labor Contracts Act," Congress.gov, 119th Congress.
- "Norcross, Stauber Introduce Bill to Speed Up First Contracts for New Unions," Office of Rep. Donald Norcross, September 16, 2025.
- "Luke Rosiak," The Dao Prize, 2025.