Federal unions owe workers more transparency. Congress can help.

The American Federation of Government Employees is asking Congress to listen to federal employees, protect their workplace rights and restore collective bargaining rights stripped by executive order. The union is right to press that case. But lawmakers should ask at the same time: How many of the employees that AFGE claims to represent actually chose it to represent them?

AFGE is the largest federal-employee union. It is currently pressing lawmakers to override the order stripping bargaining rights from agencies covering roughly 70 percent of the workforce, and to restore bargaining rights for Defense civilians through the pending National Defense Authorization Act. AFGE says it represents more than 820,000 federal and D.C. employees.

AFGE’s own 2025 financial disclosures, filed with the Labor Department’s Office of Labor-Management Standards, tells a more complicated story: It has only about 225,000 dues-paying members, or 27.5 percent of those it is representing.

Other large unions’ filings look different. My analysis of labor management reports and the number of employees cited by unions showed that the Service Employees International Union converts close to 97 percent of represented workers into members. The Teamsters convert about 90 percent. The National Treasury Employees Union, another all-federal union, converts more than 70 percent.

Represented-worker counts are self-reported and unverified, so the gap could be narrower than it looks, but sector alone is unlikely to explain it.

The gap matters because only members elect the officers who negotiate labor contracts or communicate with Congress or the executive branch. Based on my experience, turnout in AFGE elections generally runs 30 to 35........

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