FMCS Has Been Effectively Shut Down
Employees allegedly "spent taxpayer money on exotic vacations, portraits, and more."
Posted by Peter List, Editor | March 26, 2025
President Donald Trump’s downsizing of the federal government has hit the Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service (FMCS)—an agency that is largely unknown to the general public but well known to unions and labor relations practitioners—effectively shutting it down.
“The Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service is terminating most of its employees and services by the end of the day Wednesday,” reported the Federal News Network Wednesday afternoon.
The FMCS is an independent agency primarily known for offering assistance to employers and unions with collective bargaining, as well as identifying arbitrators or arbitration panels for employers and unions that cannot resolve grievances.
“In fiscal 2024,” the Federal News Network reported, “the agency conducted over 5,400 mediated negotiations and provided more than 10,000 arbitration panels to settle labor disputes.”
Recently, the Daily Wire published a highly-critical exposé of the agency, stating:
The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) occupied a nine-story office tower on D.C.’s K Street for only 60 employees, many of whom actually worked from home, prior to the pandemic. Its managers had luxury suites with full bathrooms; one manager would often be “in the shower” when she was needed, while another used her bathroom as a cigarette lounge. FMCS recorded its director as being on a years-long business trip to D.C. so he could have all of his meals and living expenses covered by taxpayers, simply for showing up to the office.
FMCS is a 230-employee agency that exists to serve as a voluntary mediator between unions and businesses. As an “independent agency,” its director nominally reports to the president, but the agency is so small that in effect, there is no oversight at all — and it showed, becoming a real-life caricature of all the excesses that the Department of Government Efficiency has alleged take place in government.
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Top FMCS official George Cohen used a “recreation and reception fund” to order champagne and $200 coasters for his office, and to purchase artwork painted by his wife. The tiny agency commissioned paintings of its top employees — as one employee told me, “like they were reigning kings or something…I’ve never seen anything like it before.” It spent $2,402 retouching the portrait of someone who briefly held the top job in an acting capacity.
Though the Trump administration will keep “a small D.C. headquarters team to continue what the administration considers to be the statutorily mandated services,” an employee told the Federal News Network, with FMCS mostly closed, employers and unions who wish to use mediation or arbitration services, as many do, will likely turn to the American Arbitration Association to fill the void.