Good Riddance, Federal Unions

President Trump’s recent executive order ending collective bargaining for most federal unions is a necessary and overdue reform, argues Judge Glock.

Federal employees are not an oppressed class. The vast majority are white-collar professionals with college degrees, earning compensation well above the private-sector average. Yet unions continue to exploit a practice known as “official time,” which allows federal workers to conduct union business while on the public payroll. “Union representatives spend hundreds of thousands of hours every year negotiating collective bargaining agreements,” Glock notes—meaning the government pays to negotiate against itself. The estimated cost to taxpayers: over $150 million annually.

“There is no justification,” Glock writes, “for handing control of the federal workforce to unions that obstruct its mission.”

Instagram recently deleted the account of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), an anti-Israel group known for harassing Jewish students, occupying buildings, and damaging property on campus.

While blocking CUAD from posting on social media might seem like a commendable step, it has, in effect, shielded the group from public scrutiny, says Manhattan Institute Legal Policy Fellow Tal Fortgang. “Posts celebrating vandalism documented infractions that might otherwise have gone unrecorded,” he writes. “This digital trail made it possible to separate fact from fiction when assessing CUAD’s behavior—essential for building the case against the group in the court of public opinion.”

In 2022, only one in five Houston students could read or do math at grade level. Today, under Superintendent Mike Miles, the city’s worst-performing schools are seeing historic gains. His approach—combining strict discipline, proven educational methods, and careful monitoring and data analysis—may offer a model for turning around struggling urban schools nationwide, writes Manhattan Institute Paulson Policy Analyst Neetu Arnold.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s whistleblower programs were created in the wake of the Bernie Madoff scandal, after would-be whistleblowers spent years trying in vain to alert regulators to the massive fraud. Those programs have since been co-opted. Well-connected lawyers and former regulators now flood the SEC with thousands of tips, “hoping for big paydays and drowning out legitimate whistleblowers in the process,” writes Josh Hammer, senior counsel at the Article III Project. Financial oversight remains vital—but the system’s constitutional flaws, lack of transparency, and vulnerability to abuse demand urgent reform.

“High school class rank is likely to be an unreliable indication of academic accomplishment. The reason is grade inflation. Grade inflation has spread everywhere.”

Photo credits: ALEX WROBLEWSKI / Contributor / AFP via Getty Images