Government financing problems develop grief for government employees prior to Christmas

Anxiety regarding furloughs from a federal government closure this time around might be a start, Soriano claimed.

“Federal employees that we represent in the American Federation of Government Employees are scared for the jobs, given the public discourse that we are all witnessing,” Soriano said.

Mac Johnson, a retired Transportation Security Administration employee who is now an executive vice president for the union’s TSA Council, said TSA employees were on “pins and needles” Friday mid-day.

Johnson said about half the TSA’s workforce was on the job during the 2018 shutdown. While TSA employees would still work at the nation’s airports during a shutdown, there’s a chance they would not be paid until a government funding measure is approved.

That’s hard to bear when many employees live paycheck to paycheck.

“It is a double whammy,” Johnson said in a telephone interview from Charlotte, North Carolina. “One, you’re not getting paid, and I think it’s going to affect the ability of any federal agency, not only TSA. You know, once upon a time, there was job security working for the federal government, but going through all of these shutdowns does not do a lot for the confidence of those potential candidates for future government employment.”

Zuagar said he’s more confused about the budget debate this time around than in previous years.

“The rhetoric is just all over the place,” he said. “There’s all these different factions of people.”

Government shutdowns not only are demoralizing to federal workers, Soriano said, but recovery takes a long time. For individuals, savings are depleted, spending is deferred and some things that once seemed necessary are suddenly out of reach.

For government agencies, a lot has to be rebuilt.

“So, it is not that the shutdown disappears, and everything goes back to normal,” Soriano said. “It takes time and effort to put a shutdown into place. It takes even more time to address all the deficiencies created by a shutdown.”

Despite the anxiety, Zuagar says he’s avoiding blaming anyone specifically for the turbulent negotiations. For now, he’s trying to be optimistic that what he’s hearing is mostly rhetoric, and support for funding federal employees and the services they provide will be there.

Still, he said it’s “shocking” to be blindsided by a crisis right before the holiday. He said he would receive his last paycheck until the impasse is resolved this weekend.

“It’s your last paycheck before Christmas, so for some of us, for myself, you’ve got to think: Do I spend it on Christmas gifts for my family, or do I hold some of that?” Zuagar said. “Because we’ve also got to pay our bills inJanuary It will affect people in the sense of how they spend this weekend.”

That’s the kind of thing he wishes lawmakers would remember as they negotiate.

“There’s real people behind all this stuff, and our hope is that, you know, they think about that,” Zuagar said.

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< p course="yf-1pe5jgtBrian Witte yf-1pe5jgt The Associated Press