The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, the nation's oldest labor union, spent more than $26 million on political activity in recent years, with 99 percent of its party committee donations flowing to Democrats, even as its own blue-collar membership swung hard toward President Donald Trump. That is the central finding of a new report from the American Accountability Foundation, a conservative watchdog group, which accuses BLET leadership of actively working against the political interests of the workers who fund the organization with their dues.
The report, first detailed by Fox News, paints a picture of a union hierarchy that endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket in 2024, cultivated ties to Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, and directed tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic committees, all while the men pulling America's freight were voting the other way.
The gap between the leadership's politics and the membership's politics is not a matter of guesswork. Teamsters polling showed a 60/40 breakdown in favor of Trump. Exit polling from the 2024 election found working-class voters without a college degree went 56 percent for Trump and 42 percent for Kamala Harris. Yet BLET's bosses kept writing checks to the other side.
The AAF report lays out a lopsided spending record that stretches back years. In the 2016 cycle, the report states, BLET donated $15,000 to the DNC, the central fundraising arm of Hillary Clinton's get-out-the-vote operation, and never donated a single dollar to the RNC.
By 2024, the pattern had not changed. Long after it had become clear that industrial union membership was strongly behind Trump, BLET leadership made 24 separate donations to Democratic party committees totaling $53,400, the report found. Republican committees received exactly two donations totaling $2,000.
That works out to a ratio of roughly 27 to 1, Democrat to Republican, in a year when the union's own rank-and-file were pulling the lever for Trump by wide margins. The report describes the political spending as a betrayal of members who believed their dues were going toward workplace advocacy, not partisan warfare.
The broader landscape of MAGA-aligned political fights in Washington makes the disconnect all the more striking. Workers who care about secure borders and American-first economic policy watched their own union bankroll the opposition.
The AAF report goes beyond campaign donations. It flags a social media campaign that, the report alleges, was designed to nudge members toward the Democratic presidential ticket. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, BLET issued 14 tweets criticizing actions of the first Trump administration while praising the Biden administration's railroad policies, the report states.
The report's language is blunt. It says the messaging "was clearly intended to skew union members toward the Democratic presidential ticket," adding that the tweets "attacked nearly every major Trump-era rail policy decision while framing the Biden administration's actions positively."
That kind of one-sided editorial posture from a union account is not unusual in the labor world. But when the membership is voting 60/40 for the Republican candidate, it raises a pointed question about whom the social media team was actually serving, the workers, or the political class the leadership preferred.
The spending accusations do not stop at political donations. The AAF report also alleges what it calls "waste and abuse" of member dues on lavish travel and executive compensation.
BLET spent more than $5 million on hotels and conferences, the report states. More than $2 million of that went to casinos and resorts alone. The report's verdict is pointed: "The union appears more concerned with staying at entertaining destination resorts than they do being thrifty with their members' dues."
Meanwhile, multiple top BLET officials earned more than $200,000 annually, and the union's president and vice president each pulled in more than $300,000, the report found. For context, the people paying those salaries through their dues are locomotive engineers and trainmen, workers who keep freight moving across the country, often on grueling schedules and away from their families for days at a time.
The contrast between leadership compensation and the day-to-day reality of the rank-and-file is the kind of thing that erodes institutional trust. It also echoes a broader pattern of Washington funding fights where the people footing the bill have little say in how the money gets spent.
Tom Jones, president of the American Accountability Foundation, did not mince words in a statement to Fox News Digital:
"The men pulling America's freight voted for President Trump because they believe in secure borders and putting American workers first. But their union bosses are busy living large on member dues and carrying water for the Left. They've turned a blue-collar brotherhood into a woke political machine that's doing everything it can against the Trump-Vance agenda, and likewise, against everyday railroad workers. Every BLET member should be asking where their hard-earned dollars are really going."
BLET, for its part, offered a terse response. A spokesperson told Fox News Digital:
"We do not comment on false press releases by dark money groups who have no accountability to the truth."
The union did not address the specific spending figures, the donation ratios, the social media campaign, or the executive compensation numbers cited in the report. It chose instead to attack the messenger. Whether that strategy satisfies dues-paying members who just watched their leadership endorse a ticket they voted against remains an open question.
The BLET situation is not occurring in a vacuum. The 2024 election exposed a widening rift between organized labor's leadership class and its rank-and-file membership across multiple unions. The Teamsters' internal polling, showing that 60/40 split favoring Trump, became one of the cycle's most talked-about data points, particularly after Teamsters president Sean O'Brien publicly discussed the pressure his union faced to fall in line behind the Democratic ticket.
BLET, which is a division of the Teamsters, endorsed Harris-Walz anyway. And the AAF report suggests the endorsement was not an isolated gesture but part of a sustained pattern of Democratic alignment stretching back years, through donations, social media, and political ties to figures like Sanders and Brown.
The report does note one area where BLET leadership crossed the aisle. Earlier this year, the union applauded Vice President JD Vance and the bipartisan reintroduction of the Railway Safety Act. Whether that represents a genuine shift or a tactical hedge after the 2024 results is unclear.
What is clear is that the union now faces scrutiny from a watchdog group armed with spending data and a membership base that is increasingly aware of the gap between its values and its leadership's political behavior. The question of whether institutional leadership reflects the people it claims to serve is not limited to unions, but few examples are as stark as this one.
The AAF report raises issues that deserve further examination. Which specific BLET leaders directed the political spending? What years are included in the "more than $26 million" figure? Which casinos and resorts received union funds, and for what stated purpose? And perhaps most importantly: do BLET members have any meaningful mechanism to hold their leadership accountable for spending decisions that run directly counter to the membership's expressed political preferences?
BLET's refusal to engage with the substance of the report, dismissing it as a "false press release" from a "dark money group", does nothing to answer those questions. If the numbers are wrong, the union could say so. It hasn't.
The broader political realignment of working-class voters toward the Republican Party and toward Trump's agenda is one of the defining shifts of this era. Union leadership that refuses to acknowledge that shift, or worse, actively works against it with member money, is not protecting workers. It is protecting its own political preferences at the workers' expense.
When the men who keep America's freight moving can't trust their own union to spend their dues honestly, the brotherhood isn't much of a brotherhood at all.
