Chicago Teachers Union leaders question timing of second federal inquiry into finances

The powerful Chicago Teachers Union that regularly slams the Trump administration received word on Thursday that its finances are being investigated by a federal agency on top of an already announced inquiry by a Republican-led U.S. House committee.

CTU leaders told WBEZ and the Sun-Times that they received a letter from the U.S. Department of Labor informing the union of an audit of its annual financial report.

The letter did not specify what prompted the audit, but it listed several possible reasons that can prompt a review, including not filing on time, document discrepancies or complaints from union members. The letter also said some unions are randomly selected. The Labor Department conducts several hundreds of these audits every year.

But CTU officials said the timing is suspicious. The letter arrived one day before the CTU was due to submit five years of audits and other financial documents to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in response to a demand from the committee to examine the union’s audits. Committee members said they wanted to determine if “reforms” were needed to the federal law that requires unions to submit financial information to the Labor Department.

The chair and one of the members of the House committee told union officials in a letter that they were made aware that the CTU has “actively sought to keep financial information from its own members.”

And they said part of the reason they launched an investigation is that Davis Gates criticized members who complained about audits not being published, “maligning the request as a racist ‘dog whistle.’”

This type of scrutiny of a union’s finances is highly unusual. Unions are private organizations with members who can hold their leaders accountable by voting them out of office. CTU’s current leadership has been in charge since 2010, and they won the latest election last year with 64% of the vote.

A spokesperson for the Labor Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

The reviews come as the Trump administration is also targeting the attorney general in New York and the chair of the Federal Reserve, both of whom have resisted doing what Trump wants. The feds also have canceled grants for Chicago Public Schools and threatened to withhold federal funding from Democrat-led states and cities.

Stacy Davis Gates, who is president of the Chicago Teachers Union and the Illinois Federation of Teachers, said to some degree, she expected to be probed.

“[The investigations] feel targeted because our union defends, protects and we expand the public good in ways that are oppositional to the right wing,” she said in an interview with WBEZ. The CTU has advocated for Black, transgender and immigrant students.

“So we stand in sharp contrast to the MAGA movement,” she said.

Davis Gates said that she’s not surprised that the CTU, under her leadership, is being attacked. As a Black woman, she said she knew she would be vulnerable to being maligned and painted as a crook, which is a historical racist trope. But this is why, she said, she has been especially careful with CTU finances and attentive to making sure the books are in order.

Davis Gates said the CTU has an extensive and inclusive process that dictates union spending and decision-making. The union’s budget is developed by the elected board of trustees and then approved by the elected executive board. Elected representatives from 500-plus schools are given regular financial updates.

“The Chicago Teachers Union is continuously maintaining the transparency and democracy that is embedded in our constitution,” she said. “We vote on everything.”

Members raise financial transparency concerns

Debates about the transparency of the CTU’s finances date back to 2024 and stem from one member’s complaint that the union is withholding financial information from members.

Phil Weiss, a school social worker, complained about audits not being published publicly, as they were prior to 2020 in a union magazine. The CTU has maintained that the organization’s constitution only requires the union to publish audit reports. Union officials said there was a delay during the pandemic, but they eventually did this.

In 2024, the Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of Weiss and three other union members. The law firm identifies itself as nonpartisan, but it is known for taking on a high-profile conservative legal case before the Supreme Court that undermined the power of labor unions.

CTU officials provided WBEZ/Sun-Times with a sign-in sheet that showed Weiss had viewed the union’s audit reports, which don’t include information about the CTU’s foundation. The CTU has insisted that its constitution does not require the release of the full audits that also include the foundation’s finances.

But the CTU says it will post the full audits of its finances for members on Friday when they are released to the House committee. The union says the House committee doesn’t get to see information that its members don’t have access to. The House committee could make the documents available to the public.

Ángel Valencia, senior counsel for the Liberty Justice Center, said in a statement that the documents viewed by Weiss “were not full and complete independent audits as have been previously available.”

Valencia said the documents appeared to be self-prepared and were missing essential elements, such as an opinion letter from an independent auditor certifying compliance with generally accepted accounting principles. Such a letter often provides context and explanatory notes, too.

“This case is ultimately about fair access and providing dues paying CTU members access to audits that they are contractually promised in their own bylaws,” Valencia wrote in the statement, “and it's good policy to show members how you spend their money.”

He said that once the full audits are released, the lawsuit will be dropped.

The audits the CTU is submitting to the House committee on Friday include statements of compliance by certified accountants, according to a review of the documents by WBEZ/Sun-Times.

Documents provide glimpse into CTU spending

CTU officials have long contended that its audits only provide high-level financial information and that the publicly available forms that unions submit to the Labor Department are much more detailed.

Those documents are typically more than 100 pages and detail how much each union staff member and vendor was paid. The union’s own audit is only about 20 pages each year and it does not provide specific information about spending or income.

The audits, which were provided to WBEZ/Sun-Times right before their submission to the House committee, offer some insight into the CTU’s finances.

• Revenue from member dues has increased over the past five years, from $28 million in 2019 to $35 million in 2024. The union attributes this to a number of factors, including that its constitution allows for a modest increase in dues and CPS has hired 7,000 additional staff members since 2021, many of whom are CTU members.
• Member dues make up the biggest part of the CTU’s revenue, but the union also gets money from other sources, including renting its headquarters and interest from investments.
• Details about spending on the CTU’s foundation and political action committee are included in the audits after 2021. 
• CTU spending on union staff salaries has gone up by $4 million since 2021. 
• In 2023, political spending skyrocketed to $3.8 million. In previous years it was less than $1 million. Union officials say they contributed heavily to the campaigns of Mayor Brandon Johnson and several school board candidates. Davis Gates says this political spending and advocacy is done in service of CTU members and the schools where they work.   
• The share of spending on member services increased to 32% in 2024, up nearly 10 percentage points over three years. CTU officials say this increase is important because the cost of hiring lawyers to represent members in grievances and other matters is included in that category and the CTU  is saving money by using in-house attorneys, rather than relying on pricier lawyers at outside firms.