I have written several times in these pages about the unfairness of a system where government employees or members of Congress don’t have to follow or live by the awful rules that the government inflicts on the private sector. I have listed a few of these examples here. You will, of course, remember Congress trying to exempt itself from Obamacare after voting to impose it on the American people or Big Labor in California fighting to exempt their members from the $15 minimum wage they thought should be imposed on everyone else.

I have also mentioned how, after the Department of Labor (DOL) finalized the job-killing overtime rule, Congress (including those who supported the rule) started panicking and looking into ways to exempt congressional offices from the additional costs that were just imposed on many American employers. I also mentioned that it wouldn’t be the first time Congress exempted itself from the burden of the overtime rule — they did the same thing in 2004:

In theory, Congress should adopt the overtime rule. As I mention above, the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995 requires that Congress comply with the overtime-pay standards established under the Fair Labor Standards Act. But the process to attaining compliance has some twists and turns. The Board of Directors for the Office of Compliance must conduct a rulemaking process, and the final rules proposed by the board, as applied to all congressional employees, must be adopted by both the House and the Senate via a resolution. In 1996, all those procedural boxes were checked. But since 2004, Congress has left the “adopt” box unchecked. . . .
This history indicates that Congress has already made an exception for itself by not adopting the 2004 overtime-pay rule update. That inaction raises the question of what Congress will do if the board recommends that both chambers adopt rules conforming to the DOL’s recent overtime-pay rule. Will Congress ignore it as it did with the 2004 update?

As it turned out, the benevolent dictators at DOL — the same people who drafted the rules — didn’t comply either. But this time it backfired. The DOL just agreed to settle a ten-year-old battle and “pay $7 million to settle a claim that the agency didn’t pay earned overtime to thousands of its own workers.”

While I appreciate the irony and I really enjoy the idea that DOL is being punished for failing to implement its own rule, it upsets the taxpayer in me. This settlement increases the spending in the department in exchange for zero added efficiency or productivity on the part of its employees.