Numbers don't lie the way politicians do. That's why when the National Institute for Labor Relations Research crunched Department of Labor filings and found labor unions poured over $1.8 billion into Democratic campaigns and political causes during the 2024 cycle—with 90 percent or more going to a single party—I followed the money like I would when vetting any investment.
With 30 years managing private wealth, running hedge funds, and testifying in federal and state courts on fiduciary duty and securities fraud, what I found on the money trail wasn't worker advocacy. It was a money-cycling machine.
The Toll Booth on Democracy
Unions don't write personal checks. They collect dues from members—teachers, construction workers, public employees—then steer voluntary PAC contributions through ActBlue, the Democrats' preferred fundraising apparatus. The tilt is so extreme it would embarrass a slot machine. The National Education Association's PAC raised nearly $27 million in the 2024 election cycle, virtually every dollar aimed at electing Democrats.
The four largest government unions—the NEA, the American Federation of Teachers, AFSCME, and the Service Employees International Union—spent more than $700 million on election-related activity in the 2021–22 cycle alone, with 96 percent flowing to Democratic candidates and organizations. That's not grassroots democracy. It's a toll booth on the road to single-party rule.
Opacity and Influence
But the scandal here isn't the partisan orientation—unions have leaned left for decades. The scandal is the opacity of the operation, the unwarranted influence being bought, and the largely unexplored potential for fraud. The union money flows primarily through ActBlue, which raised a combined $568 million for Democratic causes in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
We saw the machine in action during the pandemic. Teachers' unions lobbied the Biden administration's CDC directly; AFT staff demanded and received changes to the agency's school-reopening guidance before it was public, overriding the original science-based approach. Los Angeles schools stayed in remote learning for eighteen months while the local union demanded concessions completely unrelated to public health, such as defunding the police. Meanwhile, nine-year-olds' scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress suffered their largest decline since the 1970s, and the first-ever recorded drop in math scores.
This nonsense didn't start with COVID. Real per-pupil spending has tripled since 1970 after inflation, yet student proficiency has stagnated or fallen in most states. In 36 states, between 2003 and 2022, spending rose while eighth-grade math and reading scores dropped. That's in part because the money didn't go to the kids—it funded administrative bloat, pension obligations, and compliance bureaucracies.
Workers Left Behind
Here's the tell as to the unions' true intentions: Their leadership maintains studied silence as illegal immigration suppresses wages in the very sectors their members occupy. AFL-CIO leadership backed candidates and platforms in 2024 that advocated loosening border enforcement, all while its members watched wages stagnate in labor-saturated markets. The Economic Policy Institute has documented how excess labor supply depresses pay in precisely those blue-collar occupations—construction, transportation, services. What ever happened to protecting the workers who pay the dues?
Some will insist that PAC contributions are voluntary and dues can't legally fund campaigns. That's true, but in practice, the process is one of forced speech with a few extra steps. Member dues underwrite the union's overhead and its entire political operation; the PAC just lets the machine claim there is separation. Money is fungible, and union dues can legally fund all of the infrastructure except the checks to candidates. Polling shows only 51 percent of union members identify as Democrats, meaning roughly half of them are funding a political agenda they didn't choose. The rank-and-file workers, who largely just want decent wages and safe job sites, never get a vote on the six- or seven-figure checks their unions' bosses cut to ActBlue.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has lived in California since the 1990s. Single-party rule, fueled by union cash, has turned the state into a cautionary tale—regulatory capture, punishing taxes, non-profit grift, Medicare fraud, and sidewalks lined with tents. The same script plays wherever union political monopoly meets government monopoly. The residents and the workers always pay the tab.
The remedies are neither complicated nor radical. We must require real-time disclosure of every union PAC dollar and its ActBlue destination, extend right-to-work protections nationwide, and strengthen opt-out rights—or establish mandatory opt-in procedures—so that no worker funds politics he or she opposes. Meanwhile, we need to put real teeth into our ban on foreign and unverified donations, closing any loopholes involving prepaid cards. Most critically, we must break the public-sector unions' grip on the political process—a grip that has turned worker advocacy into a money-cycling machine that serves only itself.
