Reading the Record, Part Four: The Cost Figures: What the Numbers Are Built On

The determination presents collective bargaining as a drain on taxpayer resources, and it supports that characterization with specific dollar and hour figures.

Official time cost more than seven million dollars in a single year. Arbitrations consumed thousands of attorney hours. These numbers appear in the determination as settled facts. The material behind them is in Tab 1 of the administrative record, and reading it shows how each figure was constructed. The construction matters, because a number is only as solid as the method that produced it.

The Official Time Figure

The determination states that officer use of official time for union matters cost the agency more than 7.2 million dollars in fiscal year 2024. The record shows the calculation. TSA counted 277,033.5 hours of official time used that year, multiplied by an estimated average hourly salary of 26.48 dollars, and arrived at 7,335,846 dollars. The arithmetic is correct.

What the figure represents is worth stating precisely. It is the salary value of the hours. It is money TSA paid officers as wages, for time spent in a status federal labor law specifically authorizes. The 26.48 dollar rate is the base officer salary, which means the figure is a measure of officer wages directed to representational work and presented as a cost of the union. Official time is not a separate appropriation or an additional expenditure on top of payroll. It is payroll, allocated to activity the law permits.

None of this makes the cost imaginary. When the agency surveyed its Federal Security Directors, some described real operational impact from official time. Representatives on full-time union status were pulled from screening duties, and their absence had to be covered. One FSD put the figure at "10.5 FTE for 100% and 50% union employees." That is a genuine operational cost as seen through the eyes of a senior management official.

But the survey showed something else the determination's single national figure does not: the cost is uneven, and at many airports it is minimal. Asked directly about official time's impact, managers gave answers ranging from "none" and "minimal" to the substantial figures above. The heavy cost appears where airports have representatives on full-time union status. Where they do not, managers frequently reported little or no impact.

There is also a matter of what the figure counts, and it is a reasonable inference rather than something the record states. The figure counts the representative's hours. It does not count the represented officer's time at the meetings and hearings the process requires, nor the management time spent on the other side of those same events. The figure counts one participant in an interaction that always has at least two. We will not put a number to the difference, but the total workplace time these matters consume is higher than the figure states.

The Arbitration Figure

The determination states that TSA spent more than 7,200 attorney hours on routine arbitration matters. The record shows how that number was reached, and it is not a count.

Beginning in January 2024, TSA's litigation division handled 38 routine arbitration matters. Those 38 cases required an estimated 652 attorney hours, which averages to 17.16 attorney hours per case. TSA then multiplied that per-case average across 420 historical cases, arriving at 7,207 hours.

The figure is an extrapolation. It assumes that 420 cases stretching back to 2012 each consumed roughly the same attorney time as the average of 38 recent ones. That assumption may be reasonable or it may not, but the resulting number is a projection built on a recent sample, not a measurement of what the historical cases actually cost.

What the arbitration cases were about is also in the record, in the detailed list of those 38 matters. They are, overwhelmingly, employee discipline. Suspensions ranging from one to fourteen days, letters of reprimand, and charges of absence without leave make up the large majority of the caseload. The subjects are specific and ordinary: a five-day suspension for "Negligent Performance of Duties and Failure to Wear" a required uniform item, a notice of uniform violation "due to a neck tattoo," a fourteen-day suspension for tardiness, an alleged violation of "Weingarten rights and the CBA by not allowing union" representation at a meeting. Two of the 38 were challenges to sick leave restrictions imposed for a "pattern of absences," the same leave-restriction authority managers discussed elsewhere in the record.

These are the cases the determination characterizes as a resource burden. They are also, viewed from the officer's side, the individual protections that a grievance and arbitration system exists to provide. The same case that appears as attorney hours on the agency's ledger appears as a hearing before discipline from the checkpoint floor. Which description fits depends on where the reader stands, and the determination offers only one.

What the Numbers Rest On

We take the underlying figures as given. None of them is fabricated, so far as the record shows. The official time hours were counted. The 38 recent arbitrations were measured. The point is not that the numbers are false. The point is that each carries a context the determination does not disclose.

The official time cost is officer wages for legally authorized representation, real in its operational impact at some airports and minimal at many others, presented as a single uniform national burden. The arbitration hour total is an extrapolation from a small recent sample, presented as a measured cost. And the arbitration caseload the determination treats purely as burden is, in its own detail, the ordinary business of employee discipline and the hearings that accompany it.

Check It Yourself

The figures are in Tab 1 of the record, Bates-stamped DHS_Sept2025_CAR_010 and following, with the official time calculation early in the tab and the arbitration methodology in its own subsection. A reader can check the arithmetic, read the case subjects, and weigh for themselves whether the numbers describe waste or describe the ordinary cost of a workforce with enforceable rights.

Part five connects what the record shows to the claims now before the court.

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