The Department of Veterans Affairs headquarters in Washington. (Photo by Matt McClain/ The Washington Post)

Thursday’s hearing might have been the first shot for this Congress, but it’s not likely the last.

Two House subcommittees joined forces for Republicans to hit what they consider to be abuses of “official time.” That system allows government labor organization officials to engage in certain, but certainly not all, union-related activities while being paid by federal agencies.

Federal employees and their representatives can expect other actions affecting the workforce, in fact those actions have already begun.

Thursday marked the first hearing, but President Trump earlier imposed a temporary hiring freeze. Just before Trump took office, House Republicans reinstated the long dormant Holman Rule that permits Congress to strip the pay of individual federal employees.

Official time has long been a Republican target. But now, Republicans know they have a better chance at success because they have a friend in the White House, albeit a mercurial one.

Federal union leaders know it too.

They and their Democratic allies in Congress are fighting back, but they have a difficult battle. On the official time question, for example, no matter how often they point out that official time is used for such things as improving productivity and resolving workplace problems, Republicans narrowly and inaccurately cast it as a system allowing union people to do union business on the taxpayer’s dime.

The hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on government operations and the House Veterans’ Affairs economic opportunity subcommittee focused on official time in the Department of Veterans Affairs.  The VA is an easy target and not just because it is still spinning from the scandal that broke in 2014 over the coverup of long patient wait times. The VA also accounted for about one-third of all the federal government hours spent on official time from 2008 to 2012, according to a Government Accountability Office report that cited Office of Personnel Management (OPM) statistics.

One more thing makes the VA an easy target — poor bookkeeping.

GAO found the VA “could not accurately track the amount of time its employees spend on official time at the VA agency-wide,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the oversight subcommittee. “With the VA taking up one-third of the official time for the entire federal government, it’s important that it employs accurate methods to calculate and records to show how much time we’re spending on those union activities.”