Government unions have turned federal employment into a protection racket for lazy bureaucrats.
One federal employee proved how corrupt the whole system has become.
And a government union boss was caught stealing from taxpayers with this jaw-dropping scheme.
Living the high life in Mexico City on your dime
Malcolm Alexander-Neal told his bosses at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission he was working from Chicago.
He lied.
Alexander-Neal was living in Mexico City, working barely 20 hours a week, and collecting $200,000 in salary and benefits while serving as president of the National Treasury Employees Union.¹
Think about that for a second. The guy running a government employee union wasn't even living in America.
From March 2024 to December 2024, Alexander-Neal logged just 542 hours of work — less than half what he should have worked.¹
And get this: when Alexander-Neal did bother to turn on his computer, 90% of his emails dealt with union business. Only 7% involved his actual CFTC job.¹
Taxpayers funded a union boss who spent his time doing union business on the taxpayers’ dime.
The CFTC only caught Alexander-Neal because he published an autobiography bragging about his lifestyle.
Investigators discovered he'd "worked" from 11 different countries — Lebanon, Chile, the Dominican Republic.¹
He set up a Virtual Private Network to hide his Mexico City location and violated every CFTC policy in the book.
When confronted, Alexander-Neal lied to investigators before finally admitting the truth.
He was placed on leave in February, officially left in July, and now runs his own accounting firm.¹
No criminal charges. No real consequences.
This is why government unions need to be abolished
Senator Chuck Grassley called Alexander-Neal's scheme "a textbook case of government waste, fraud and abuse."
"Mr. Alexander-Neal defrauded American taxpayers and failed to uphold his oath as a federal employee," Grassley told the Washington Free Beacon. "Every dollar he stole should be returned."¹
But here's what Grassley and every American needs to understand: Alexander-Neal isn't the problem. He's a symptom.
Government unions are the disease.
These unions exist for one purpose — to make it impossible to fire incompetent, lazy, or criminal federal employees.
They've built a fortress of protections so strong that a union boss can literally live in another country, work 20 hours a week, and collect $200,000 a year without facing real consequences.
The House Oversight Committee exposed the game in a January 2025 report.
Biden's administration "worked with federal labor union allies not only to lock in high telework levels, but to undermine the ability of the incoming Trump Administration to unlock them, and to manage its own workforce."¹
That's the whole scam right there.
Government unions lobbied Biden to make remote work permanent. Then union bosses like Alexander-Neal exploited those rules to steal from taxpayers while spending their "work" hours on union business — protecting more federal workers from accountability.
It's a self-perpetuating corruption machine.
Private sector unions at least have to worry about the company going bankrupt if workers don't perform.
Government unions face no such pressure. Taxpayers can't take their business elsewhere. They’re a captive audience funding our own fleecing.
Alexander-Neal worked for the CFTC, an agency that's supposed to prevent fraud in commodities markets.
The irony would be funny if it weren't so infuriating. The fraud was happening inside the building, committed by the guy who was supposed to analyze risk.
And he got away with it for three years because government unions have rigged the system to protect their own.
President Trump tried to end the telework scam at the end of his first term. Biden immediately reversed course as a gift to the unions that bankroll Democrat campaigns.
Now Trump's back, and he needs to finish the job. Not just on telework — on the entire government union racket that makes schemes like Alexander-Neal's possible in the first place.
¹ Chuck Ross, "Federal Union Leader Collected Six-Figure US Government Salary From Mexico City, Where He Hardly Worked, Records Show," Washington Free Beacon, December 9, 2025.
