Aug 5, 2026 · 12 min · 10 segments
The Freedom Foundation's investigation into the American Federation of Teachers has now evolved into two separate investigations, and in this episode Siena breaks down what it means, how we got here…
Siena RoseHostMax Ford NelsonGuest
One is the investigation by the House Republicans, and the second is a federal investigation by the Department of Labor.
Bloomberg Law recently reported that the US Department of Labor's top watchdog is investigating these allegations, specifically, um, the Office of Labor Department Inspector General Anthony Desposito, who was appointed to that position by President Trump himself.
It's really cool to see multiple investigations rightfully coming down the pipeline towards AFT.
But I do want to note that this is not the first time that Freedom Foundation filings have, or findings have resulted a federal response.
We have actually two SCOTUS cases, Harris v. Quinn in 2014 and Janus v. AFSCME in 2018, that have famously set the bar high for workers' rights, as well as other investigative pieces similar to this research report on the American Federation of Teachers.
And something I wanna highlight, too, about this story is that Randi Weingarten will go really, uh, it's nearly impressive, not quite impressive, though, will go above and beyond to stretch or outright deny the truth.
In a pretty outlandish quote that kind of makes me laugh, um, that Bloomberg Law highlighted in their article says, "In a May statement, Weingarten said that the Freedom Foundation report is so wrong on the facts as to be embarrassing even for them, claiming that it misrepresented the union's financial reports.
Proceeds from the book would be shared equally with the AFT, she added." Randi Weingarten f- fails to understand that unlike her, we are not miserable people who delight in making someone's life harder just for the bit and the experience of it.
She is very upset and clearly annoyed that she is being held to a common sense standard and is lashing out by trying to claim that somehow the black and white facts of her financial statements from her union that we drew reasonable conclusions from are so wrong, it's embarrassing.
[laughs] Max Ford Nelson, the researcher, even told me in an interview at the Teacher Freedom Summit a few weeks ago that he reported on things that we know to be categorically true, like, there, there are no falsehoods anywhere in the report that we put out.
And there are other examples of spending that AFT did that were probably related to the book, but because we don't have a line-by-line breakdown, as in Max could not find a line-by-line breakdown of those extra spendings, they were all just lumped together, like, we can't fully allege those things, so he didn't include them.
The things he did include are categorically true assessments of what the money that AFT took was spent on.
One is the investigation by the House Republicans, and the second is a federal investigation by the Department of Labor.
Bloomberg Law recently reported that the US Department of Labor's top watchdog is investigating these allegations, specifically, um, the Office of Labor Department Inspector General Anthony Desposito, who was appointed to that position by President Trump himself.
It's really cool to see multiple investigations rightfully coming down the pipeline towards AFT.
But I do want to note that this is not the first time that Freedom Foundation filings have, or findings have resulted a federal response.
We have actually two SCOTUS cases, Harris v. Quinn in 2014 and Janus v. AFSCME in 2018, that have famously set the bar high for workers' rights, as well as other investigative pieces similar to this research report on the American Federation of Teachers.
And something I wanna highlight, too, about this story is that Randi Weingarten will go really, uh, it's nearly impressive, not quite impressive, though, will go above and beyond to stretch or outright deny the truth.
In a pretty outlandish quote that kind of makes me laugh, um, that Bloomberg Law highlighted in their article says, "In a May statement, Weingarten said that the Freedom Foundation report is so wrong on the facts as to be embarrassing even for them, claiming that it misrepresented the union's financial reports.
Proceeds from the book would be shared equally with the AFT, she added." Randi Weingarten f- fails to understand that unlike her, we are not miserable people who delight in making someone's life harder just for the bit and the experience of it.
She is very upset and clearly annoyed that she is being held to a common sense standard and is lashing out by trying to claim that somehow the black and white facts of her financial statements from her union that we drew reasonable conclusions from are so wrong, it's embarrassing.
[laughs] Max Ford Nelson, the researcher, even told me in an interview at the Teacher Freedom Summit a few weeks ago that he reported on things that we know to be categorically true, like, there, there are no falsehoods anywhere in the report that we put out.
And there are other examples of spending that AFT did that were probably related to the book, but because we don't have a line-by-line breakdown, as in Max could not find a line-by-line breakdown of those extra spendings, they were all just lumped together, like, we can't fully allege those things, so he didn't include them.
The things he did include are categorically true assessments of what the money that AFT took was spent on.
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