Shutdown stories

[onekidanddone]

7 minutes ago, fransalley said:

I'm making a list of the food I need, then I'm going to stock my pantry.

I'm going to make sure I pay up all my bills.

[GreyhoundFan]

"How the shutdown ended: Americans just had it up to here"

Spoiler

Finally and suddenly, America had had enough.

The drizzle of effects of the government shutdown morphed into a downpour, a winter storm of disruption, dysfunction and desperation that shocked stubborn politicians into action.

The 35-day shutdown was supposedly going to linger for months because President Trump’s base insisted on a wall along the border with Mexico and the Democratic base demanded that federal workers return to their jobs without condition.

Now, that debate has been kicked down the road for three weeks. Despite his vow that he would never reopen the government without money for the wall, Trump relented without the promise of a single dollar.

The startling about-face happened because the shutdown almost overnight came to seem dangerous: an economic threat, a shock to the safety of the skies, and a political punch that un­settled both parties.

In a 24-hour flurry of events that added up to a breaking point, flight attendants warned that high absenteeism among air traffic controllers who weren’t being paid posed a threat to passengers’ sense of safety. Long delays hit several major airports because of control-tower staffing shortages, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Ford and other major manufacturers warned that the shutdown was delivering a hard hit to the nation’s economy. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce alerted politicians that the travel and tourism industries were suffering harsh consequences. Thousands of Internal Revenue Service workers who had been ordered back to work to process tax refunds stayed home, many saying they couldn’t afford to get to their jobs without pay.

Several polls showed a serious drop in Americans’ optimism about the economy. The president’s disapproval numbers jumped five points, to 58 percent, from three months ago, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. And some senior members of Trump’s own administration started speaking out against the shutdown in strikingly sharp language.

“Making some people stay home when they don’t want to, and making others show up without pay, it’s mind-boggling, it’s shortsighted and it’s unfair,” FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told bureau employees in a video message. “It takes a lot to get me angry, but I’m about as angry as I’ve been in a long, long time.”

The 800,000 federal workers who were either barred from working or forced to work without pay had been frustrated for weeks that their plight was being ignored or pooh-poohed by people in power.

And on Thursday, a series of comments from Trump administration officials exacerbated that feeling. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross drew widespread ridicule for suggesting that federal workers who were lining up at food banks instead should just “get a loan.”

“That was ridiculous,” said Andrew Perry, 51, whose wait Friday for a flight from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to Miami had stretched beyond two hours. “No matter what your means are, you can’t get a loan that quickly. . . . I know what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck.”

The scene at airports in New York, Newark, Philadelphia and other big cities, where long delays resulted from the shortage of traffic controllers, helped persuade Trump that the shutdown had to come to an end, according to White House officials.

Many travelers said Friday’s inconveniences cemented their belief that the shutdown was an unnecessary, juvenile battle that was more about a refusal to back down than about any deep rift over policy.

Stefanie Cornwall, 27, arrived for her Spirit flight out of Philadelphia International Airport 30 minutes earlier than she typically would. Cornwall, who was flying to Los Angeles to visit family, had serious concerns that the shutdown was affecting travel safety.

“It’s obviously annoying when you have to wait in line for a long time, but what’s more concerning is whether the planes are being properly checked,” she said. Although she had been talking about the shutdown with friends and family for weeks, this was the first time she felt directly affected.

“I’m affected because it’s annoying and it’s a nuisance to me, but for these federal workers, they’re not being paid, even when they’re coming in to work,” she said. “It’s ridiculous.”

“Do we have your attention, Congress?” the Association of Flight Attendants said in a statement early Friday that warned that air safety workers were ­“fatigued, worried and distracted. . . . Our country’s entire economy is on the line.”

Democrats and Republicans alike felt public opinion shifting. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said Friday that the airport trouble “ratchets up pressure tremendously.” And Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) sensed that the effects of the shutdown “have become very real and very personal for a lot of people who aren’t getting paid, and it obviously has a lot of impacts on ATC and TSA and a lot of other pretty important functions and agencies right now.” The initials stand for air traffic controllers and the Transportation Safety Administration.

In the end, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said, the public’s mounting worry about the shutdown’s economic impact moved politicians off their hard stances.

“With public sentiment, you can accomplish anything,” she said.

For the president, backing down from his vow not to reopen the government without a down payment of $5.7 billion on the wall he wanted to fulfill a signature 2016 campaign promise was both a convenient distraction and a dangerous retreat.

Settling the shutdown crisis provided Trump with a chance to deliver one of his trademark preemptions of bad publicity. His Rose Garden appearance instantly changed the national conversation away from the arrest Friday morning of his longtime adviser, Roger Stone, on charges that Stone lied to Congress about his role in the effort to undermine Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

On cable news channels, a ­seven-hour-long marathon of coverage of the indictment of one of Trump’s most loyal associates ended, replaced by live video of the president’s lectern. It was another assertion of the president’s ability to change the subject and monopolize the nation’s attention.

But Trump also was bitterly attacked for agreeing to end the shutdown without gaining any money for the wall.

Although public opinion weighed heavily against the shutdown all along, it had shifted in the past few days from concern for unpaid workers to insecurity about the well-being and safety even of people with no government ties.

Ben Alderman, who was heading home to Chicago from LaGuardia, said he was “dumbfounded” by Ross’s remarks and appalled by the “political games” that politicians were playing with federal workers’ lives. He said politicians appear to genuinely believe that missed wages “are not really important to people,” said Alderman, 35. “It’s divorced from reality.”

A frequent air traveler who works in financial services, Alderman said he wasn’t frightened to fly Friday, but he was glad flights were delayed rather than pushed into the air despite high absenteeism among traffic controllers and TSA agents.

“What happened this morning is a testament to our safety,” he said. “If there aren’t enough people working, planes shouldn’t be in the air.”

Joe Keefe, an asset management executive, was booked on a flight from LaGuardia to Boston. But in the middle of his business in New York, he saw the news about the airport delays and changed his plans.

“We decided to take the train,” said Keefe, 65, of Rye, N.H. The change was the first concrete impact the shutdown had had on him, but he’d been upset about it all along. “I hope it’s a political disaster for him,” he said, referring to Trump. “The American people know where the blame lies. . . . It’s a manufactured crisis.”

Pete Nischt, 32, of Akron, Ohio, didn’t like the shutdown from the start, and now his flight from New York to Cleveland was delayed for three hours. In recent days, as he saw how people who had gone without pay for a month were suffering, he came to view the failure to pay public employees as “a breach of the social contract. Trump has been lying the whole time . . . and now we’re paying for it.”

The scope of that suffering seemed to metastasize late this week. At the IRS, at least 14,000 unpaid workers who were supposed to be in the office, preparing to process an avalanche of tax refunds, either could not be reached by their bosses or were out on “hardship” leave, in many cases because they said they could no longer afford gasoline to get to work.

Rosemary Bruscato, 50, who has worked at the IRS in Kansas City, Mo., for 10 years, said her manager placed her on leave after a two-minute conversation. It cost her $20 each week to fill the tank of her Ford Focus, and she had been paid zero dollars in 35 days.

“There was no retaliation or anything,” she said. “They were very understanding.”

Even as Congress finally moved toward funding the shuttered portions of the government, many workers struggled to meet their expenses. In many cases, it was missing that second paycheck on Friday that put them over the edge.

In the District, the Greater DC Diaper Bank has given away 33,800 diapers, 50,684 feminine hygiene products and nearly 7,900 incontinence supplies to federal workers, including Deborah Myrick, a D.C. Superior Court employee who picked up diapers and formula for her two grandchildren.

“It’s frustrating,” said Myrick, who lives in Temple Hills, Md. “There’s no other way to put it. I can’t manage without a check.”

Myrick and other employees stood in a line that snaked around World Central Kitchen’s #ChefsforFeds pop-up kitchen, which offered free lunch, vegetables, fruit, pet food and diapers. Some people hung their heads, as though they did not want to be spotted, and many declined to talk about it. One man picking up diapers said he felt a deep sense of shame that, as someone who is employed, he needed to seek help.

“The whole thing is very numbing,” Cynthia Clarke, an administrative assistant with the U.S. Agency for Global Media, said as she sipped vegetable soup. “This is a man-made disaster. I know what a natural disaster looks like. I’ve been through earthquakes. This was man-made. This was unnecessary.”

 

[fransalley]

The Super Bowl is next week.  I live in Atlanta and we are expecting major air traffic.  I wonder if that had anything to do with it as well.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Inside Trump’s shutdown turnaround"

Spoiler

His poll numbers were plummeting. His FBI director was decrying the dysfunction. The nation’s air travel was in chaos. Federal workers were lining up at food banks. Economic growth was at risk of flatlining, and even some Republican senators were in open revolt.

So on Friday, the 35th day of a government shutdown that he said he was proud to instigate, President Trump finally folded. After vowing for weeks that he would keep the government closed unless he secured billions in funding for his promised border wall, Trump agreed to reopen it.

He got $0 instead.

Trump’s capitulation to Democrats marked a humiliating low point in a polarizing presidency and sparked an immediate backlash among some conservative allies, who cast him as a wimp.

Elected as a self-proclaimed master dealmaker and business wizard who would bend Washington to his will and stand firm on his campaign promises — chief among them the wall — Trump risks being exposed as ineffective.

“He was the prisoner of his own impulse and it turned into a catastrophe for him,” said David Axelrod, who was a White House adviser to President Barack Obama. “The House of Representatives has power and authority — and now a speaker who knows how to use it — so that has to become part of his calculation or he’ll get embarrassed again.”

Trump’s quest for at least some portion of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border is not over, however. Friday’s agreement only temporarily reopens the government, providing a three-week ­period for Congress to negotiate a longer-term spending agreement. The president said he would continue advocating for his signature campaign promise and threatened to again shut down the government or declare a national emergency to use his unilateral powers to build the wall if Congress does not appropriate funding for it by Feb. 15.

“Let me be very clear: We really have no choice but to build a powerful wall or steel barrier,” Trump said Friday. He also tweeted in the evening that his decision “was in no way a concession.”

But when Trump stood alone in a bitter-cold White House Rose Garden on Friday afternoon to announce that the government was reopening with no money for the wall, he punctuated five weeks of miscalculation and mismanagement by him and his administration.

This account of Trump’s stymied pursuit of border wall funding is based on interviews with more than a dozen senior administration officials, Trump confidants and others briefed on internal discussions, many of whom requested anonymity to speak candidly.

For weeks, Trump has sought an exit ramp from the shutdown that would still secure wall funding, and for weeks his advisers failed to identify a viable one.

Trump repeatedly predicted to advisers that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) would cave and surmised that she had a problem with the more liberal members of her caucus. But she held firm, and her members stayed united.

“Why are they always so loyal?” Trump asked in one staff meeting, complaining that Democrats so often stick together while Republicans sometimes break apart, according to attendees.

As for their negotiations, Trump and Pelosi had not spoken since their Jan. 9 session in which the president stormed out of the White House Situation Room. In a meeting with some columnists on Friday, Pelosi was asked why she thought Trump had not created a more potent nickname for her than “Nancy.” She replied, according to a senior Democratic aide, “Some people think that’s because he understands the power of the speaker.”

Trump and his advisers misunderstood the will of Democrats to oppose wall funding. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, emerged as the most powerful White House adviser during the shutdown and told colleagues that Trump’s plan for $5.7 billion in wall funding would get Democratic votes in the Senate on Thursday, astonishing Capitol Hill leaders and other White House aides.

Kushner, who Trump jokingly says is to the “left,” pitched a broader immigration deal and had faith that he could negotiate a grand bargain in the coming weeks, according to people familiar with his discussions. He pitched a big deal to Latino groups this week and also with members of the Koch network, the people said.

Trump, who fretted about the shutdown’s impact on the economy and his personal popularity, cast about for blame and pointed fingers at his staff — including Kushner — for failing to resolve the impasse, according to aides.

At a meeting Wednesday with conservative groups, the president accused former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) of having “screwed him” by not securing border wall money when Republicans had the majority, according to one attendee, Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He said Ryan should have gotten him money before he left but he had no juice and had “gone fishing,” according to two attendees.

Ryan had warned the president against a shutdown and told him it would be politically disastrous, according to a person familiar with their conversations.

All the while, Trump vowed he would never capitulate to Democrats. At the Wednesday meeting, “he said there would be no caving,” Krikorian said. “Everybody who spoke up applauded him for not caving, but warned him that any further movement toward the Democrats’ direction would be a problem.”

White House aides had been monitoring Transportation Security Administration data on airport security delays and staffing levels several times a day. Officials said Thursday that the situation was worsening and would probably force the end of the shutdown.

But events at the Capitol on Thursday are largely what triggered Trump to conclude that he had run out of time and that he had to reopen the government, his aides said.

Trump lost control of his party as fissures emerged among exasperated Republican senators. Six of them voted Thursday for a Democratic spending bill, and others privately voiced frustration with Vice President Pence and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) during a closed-door, contentious luncheon.

“Everyone who saw the floor action realized we were basically at the same place where we began and we needed a different solution,” a White House official said of Thursday’s votes.

McConnell called Trump on Thursday to say that the shutdown could not hold because some of his members were in revolt. The president did not commit to ending it in that call, but he phoned McConnell back that evening to say he had concluded the shutdown had to end, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations.

Under attack from some Republican colleagues, McConnell told senators on Friday that Trump had come up with the idea for a three-week deal — and that the president would be announcing it.

When Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) visited the White House on Thursday, he said Trump was in a “pragmatic” mood, mentioning the failed Senate votes and saying he wanted to make a deal.

Pence and Kushner presented the president with several options that would reopen the government, according to a White House official. They included using his executive authority to declare a national emergency and redirect other public funds for the wall, an option Trump said Friday he was holding in reserve. Trump also briefly considered a commission that would study a wall, according to a senior administration official.

On Thursday night, the president grew annoyed at Mick Mulvaney when the acting White House chief of staff talked with him about policy prescriptions for the next three weeks and what an eventual deal might look like, according to one person familiar with the conversation.

Administration officials began immediately on this next phase; Mulvaney and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen met privately with a handful of Republican senators at Camp David on Friday evening to start discussing what a border security agreement might look like, according to multiple people familiar with the gathering.

Ultimately, aides said, Trump was willing to table debate over wall funding because he is convinced he can win support from some Democratic lawmakers over the next three weeks.

Friday’s agreement allows for a conference committee made up of rank-and-file members from each party to negotiate border security funding, which White House aides said they believe will enable more flexibility than existed during Trump’s stalemate with Pelosi.

A senior White House official said the administration’s negotiating team has received “dozens of signals from Democrats that they are willing to give the president wall money,” but declined to name any such lawmakers.

The administration may have been referring to a letter written by freshman Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) and signed by more than 30 House Democrats, which merely called for a vote on Trump’s border security proposal once the government reopens.

But “that vote would obviously fail in the House,” one senior Democratic aide pointed out. “This is just pathetic spin.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said, “The poll numbers tell a very stark story, but it’s only part of the more enduring longer-term effect on the president’s credibility. He essentially held America hostage for a vanity project and a campaign applause line that the American people saw clearly was never worth shutting down the government to achieve.”

Trump’s approval ratings have fallen in most public polls, including a Washington Post-ABC News survey released Friday that found 37 percent approve of his presidency and 58 percent disapprove.

Trump risks further angering independent voters who do not agree with the prolonged shutdown and conservatives who disapprove of him caving after 35 days with no win.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter, whose criticism of Trump in mid-December helped inspire the president to shut the government in protest over wall funding, registered her disapproval of his Friday decision.

“Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States,” Coulter tweeted.

For months, Republican senators had been trying to warn Trump against a shutdown. Last June, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the chamber’s point person on Homeland Security funding, met privately with Trump not only to tout their bipartisan border security spending package but also to nudge him away from a confrontation over the wall.

“I just said, ‘Shutdowns are miserable,’ ” Capito said Friday, recounting that Oval Office conversation. “The last one was miserable. And this one was double miserable, and so, you know, maybe you have to live through it to really get the sense of it.”

King faulted the conservative Freedom Caucus, led by Reps. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), both Trump confidants, for steering the president in the wrong direction.

“I hope he ignores them for the next three weeks,” King said. “It’s the charge of the light brigade. It’s the valley of death.”

 

[milkteeth]

I think there's something really poetic about the air traffic controllers at Laguardia going on strike calling in sick that was enough to finally break the camel's back and cause Trump to cave. I'm guessing Reagan is rolling over in his grave right now. ?

 

I hope there is continued labor organizing among federal workers during the next three weeks, and that if the GOP tries to pull another shut down more workers go on strike call in sick that it brings the whole sham down within hours. There is tremendous power when workers stick together and fight back! 

[onekidanddone]

9 minutes ago, milkteeth said:

I think there's something really poetic about the air traffic controllers at Laguardia going on strike calling in sick that was enough to finally break the camel's back and cause Trump to cave. I'm guessing Reagan is rolling over in his grave right now. ?

 

I hope there is continued labor organizing among federal workers during the next three weeks, and that if the GOP tries to pull another shut down more workers go on strike call in sick that it brings the whole sham down within hours. There is tremendous power when workers stick together and fight back! 

We have an amazing President at my Local. I expect him to keep the momentum rolling. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Tim Kaine isn’t apologizing for his anti-shutdown tactics"

Spoiler

“America’s Dad” was getting on his colleagues’ nerves. But he’s OK with that.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) objected to the Senate adjourning for the past two weekends — making the shutdown just a little more painful for senators by forcing some to stay in Washington.

He says Republicans and Democrats privately complained to him about the quixotic maneuver, and some colleagues asked him to back down, but he didn’t budge.

“Recovering from the shutdown’s damage will be painful for federal employees, but I will do everything I can to prevent this from ever happening again,” Kaine said Friday in a statement.

Kaine’s weeks-long effort came to an end Friday after President Donald Trump announced an agreement to reopen the government for three weeks without the $5.7 billion in border wall money that he’s demanded. Trump threatened to declare a national emergency if lawmakers can’t come to an agreement on immigration and border security by Feb. 15.

Kaine on Friday said he’s aware that the reprieve is temporary and urged both parties to work toward a long-term deal to “ensure no one can ever again hold public servants hostage by using a government shutdown as a negotiating tactic.”

Keeping the Senate in session provided Kaine a high-profile platform to demand relief for the thousands of furloughed federal workers he represents in northern Virginia. In addition to keeping the Senate open, Kaine also mounted public pressure this week volunteering to serve food at Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen and holding a news conference with airport workers at the Ronald Reagan National Airport.

The shutdown has marked a big moment for Kaine, who largely avoided the spotlight after falling short in the 2016 election as Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential running mate. Since then, he’s also bounced back by trouncing Corey Stewart in his 2018 reelection campaign.

Kaine, who has a reputation for getting along with Republicans and Democrats alike, acknowledged the inconvenience he caused senators who tend to have regimented schedules. It also forced a presiding officer — a member of the majority party, according to the rules of the Senate — to be present.

“Getting presiders isn’t so easy,” Kaine said. “All the senators who live closest to D.C. are Democrats, but we’re not presiders.”

Yet Kaine’s push wasn’t just an empty gesture. Earlier this month, Kaine struck a deal with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to allow the Senate to leave in exchange for legislation that guarantees back pay to federal employees hurt by the shutdown.

Kaine’s demands have led to some awkward scenes, such as last weekend, when he demanded the Senate stay in session during the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday until Senate leadership brought House-passed legislation to reopen the government. The Senate was open Saturday, but only three senators joined Kaine in the massive, near-empty chamber: Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and fellow Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner.

Kaine’s Senate colleagues didn’t criticize him publicly. When asked whether she was annoyed that Kaine was holding the Senate open last weekend, Collins, who presided over the session, replied “no.”

Republican Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) also said “every senator has the right to do what they believe in” while Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) described himself as a “strong supporter” of Kaine’s actions and said they help ensure that Congress is spending its time focused on reopening the government.

The shutdown had strained relationships between Democrats and Republicans on the Hill. And he predicted that the fight over the shutdown will prove to be tougher for the Senate to get over than the emotionally raw battle over Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court.

“This one will be tougher than Kavanaugh because the effect is so massive,” he said.

Despite the tensions, Kaine said he’s come to realize that his place is in the Senate. He added that the institution will soon face other important tests, including its response to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference.

“The next two years may be the reason I’m supposed to be in the Senate, that thought has occurred to me often,” Kaine said. “The Senate has the capacity to be an emergency brake against bad behavior if we do our job right. I don’t have a hard time finding my motivation coming to work.”

 

[SilverBeach]

6 hours ago, milkteeth said:

I hope there is continued labor organizing among federal workers during the next three weeks

Many, if not most of us, already belong to federal unions.

[onekidanddone]

16 minutes ago, SilverBeach said:

Many, if not most of us, already belong to federal unions.

My Union saved my career. Ten years ago I had an toxic boss who bullied people for sport. I was headed for a complete breakdown and being a single mom at the time I could barely take care of my kid. 

Anyway my Union ended his reign of terror. He was preparing to get me fired but broke rule after rule trying to do so.  It took my rep (who is now our Local President) just one short meeting to expose evil boss.

My grandfather worked in garment factories in the early 1900s. His generation fought hard to win their rights.

I could sing Union Maid by heart by the time I was five.

ETA: As soon as I can I’m going to set up a meeting with my Union rep. Management has been doing some hinkey things and my rep thinks it is going in Agency wide. They are trying to force out everyone over a certain age.

Side note my autocorrect kept trying to change hinkey to honkey

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Backlogs, deadlines and a massive bureaucratic reboot await federal workers after shutdown’s end"

Spoiler

An avalanche of emails, backlogged permits, lapsed contracts and stalled payments to low-income Americans will face the hundreds of thousands of federal employees who return to work Monday.

For 35 days, they waited out the shutdown of nine Cabinet agencies and dozens of smaller ones. Now, they’ll face a massive bureaucratic reboot.

A return to normal operations could take weeks or even months. The National Park Service will need to restore basic amenities at hundreds of parks and monuments, removing accumulated trash and plowing multiple feet of snow. The Bureau of Indian Affairs must quickly issue grants to head off food shortages and a health-care crisis for Native American tribal members whose funding was cut off.

Inspectors returning from furlough to the National Transportation Safety Board will have to decide which of the almost 100 rail, plane and highway crashes to investigate first. And the Internal Revenue Service will race to train employees to implement changes to the tax code and hire thousands of temporary workers for tax season.

“I’m so ready to go back to work,” said Laura Barmby, an international trade specialist with the Commerce Department. She was so anxious to dig into her backlog she planned to log in to her computer from home on Sunday.

Barmby’s immediate concern is a blown deadline for a prestigious presidential awards program for exporters, “a big deal in my little world,” she said. After that, she intends to contact a group of companies advising the U.S. government on an upcoming trade pact with the United Kingdom to reschedule multiple missed meetings.

The first order of business for her and more than 350,000 others who spent the shutdown at home will be simple office tasks, like new passwords for computers. Timecards will need filling out, so payroll staffs know who was furloughed, worked without pay, called in sick, earned overtime or a combination.

Then there will be the reorganizing. After the shutdown was announced in December, agencies had four hours to close. Employees had just enough time to drop off work cellphones and laptops and record voice mail greetings. Many returning workers will find their offices in a holiday time warp. As of Friday, a Christmas tree and Hanukkah menorah still adorned the darkened, fifth-floor reception area of the Merit Systems Protection Board, a personnel court for civil servants in downtown Washington. Vice Chairman Mark Robbins said he’s had no staff to take them down.

New voice mail greetings will have to be recorded, announcing the reopening. Programs will need to be restarted, a process that can involve many layers of bureaucracy and boxes to be checked. Private contractors may have reassigned employees who had been working on projects put on hold during the shutdown, said David Berteau, president and chief executive of the Professional Services Council, which represents workers at roughly 400 private government contractors.

“It may take days to get started,” he said. “We have no experience at starting back up after five weeks . . . You have to make sure that the funds are still available before you can start the contract again. And everybody’s going to be trying to do it at once.”

Even employees who are anxious to get back to work say they feel paralyzed by what comes next.

When she steps into her office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center on Monday morning, astrophysicist Julie McEnery knows exactly what she’ll do first: water her plants. But then?

“I’m scared to even think about it,” she said. “The amount of work isn’t less, and we’ve got a lot less time now to do it.”

As project scientist for the Fermi Space Telescope, which surveys the cosmos using the highest-energy form of light, McEnery was called into Goddard a couple of times this month to take care of specific tasks related to the maintenance of the telescope. “I hope people know this was not a vacation,” she said. “It was very discouraging . . . We’re not all going to arrive back at work Monday bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

To boost morale, several agencies are planning hero’s welcomes for their staffs. The Peace Corps is holding an official event for returning employees starting at 7:30 a.m. Monday.

But many workers say they’re still anxious. They won’t see the back pay they’re owed until later this week. And President Trump has threatened another closure in three weeks if his demands for border wall funding aren’t met.

“It’s a reprieve,” said Gary Morton, president of AFGE Council 238, a union representing about 9,000 Environmental Protection Agency employees around the country, “but how much will we be able to accomplish before we have to start worrying about shutdown procedures again if they don’t reach a deal?”

Several federal managers said their agencies still cannot issue or announce new grants with the uncertainty of such a short-term budget. A senior manager at Homeland Security who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to speak publicly said he is allowing his staff to work from home until they have back pay cash in hand.

For offices in which staffs were essentially entirely furloughed, the return to normal operations could be particularly slow.

The EPA, for example, must now update its enforcement actions database, which has sat idle for more than a month, along with other key computer registries and air and water permits across the country, a senior administration official said. Agency experts had stopped certifying that new auto models meet U.S. air standards, slowing Fiat Chrysler’s plan to bring in a new model of a heavy-duty commercial work truck, officials said.

The Food and Drug Administration will start taking new drug and medical device applications, but agency officials acknowledge they may not fully catch up for almost a year.

Then there will be the physical messes to clean up .

At Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state, where no snow has been plowed since before Christmas, staffers must clear a highway stretching several miles uphill 2,500 feet in elevation to the main visitor center, along with large parking lot now covered by at least three feet of snow, with seven-foot drifts. Park officials announced Saturday that visitors should be able to reach Longmire, where the park’s hotel and museum are located, Sunday. But they cautioned it “may take many days” to restore access to the main visitor center and other high-elevation attractions.

A major cleanup awaits the staff at Sagamore Hill National Historic Site in New York, where a fire started in the gift shop late last month. On Monday, Park Service staff will continue working through the damage to document what has been lost and begin cleaning up.

The IRS told lawmakers last week that the agency will be buried in millions of unanswered taxpayer letters, weeks behind schedule on training and short thousands of new employees for this tax season, according to two House aides who were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

The National Taxpayer Advocate Service a government watchdog group that oversees the tax collector, told House staffers it will likely take a year for the IRS to run normally again, the aides said.

The reopening of the Smithsonian scheduled for Tuesday will mean much more than the return of visitors. Deadlines for upcoming exhibitions have passed. The National Gallery of Art has been unable to prepare for its much-anticipated Tintoretto show, set to open March 10. It’s the highlight of its spring calendar — the first North American retrospective of the Venetian artist — and the staff is worried about a potential delay.

Three other exhibitions have been postponed because work on the installations couldn’t be done: “Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence” at the National Portrait Gallery (set to open March 1) “Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths” at the National Museum of African Art (Feb. 27) and the Smithsonian Gardens’ popular orchid display, planned this year for the Kogod Courtyard at the NPG and Smithsonian American Art Museum. (Feb. 2). New opening dates have not been announced.

Federally funded science research could take a long time to recover too, scientists said. At the National Science Foundation, there’s a backlog of nearly 2,000 research grants waiting to be reviewed, on subjects ranging from cyberinfrastructure to earth sciences. More than 100 panels of outside scientists were canceled during the shutdown. Rescheduling them will be a massive undertaking.

“The impacts are going take some time to sort out,” said Benjamin Corb, spokesman for the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. “It is likely that the scientific enterprise won’t truly know what the impact was for months.”

A program director for the NSF, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly, said the agency’s reopening brings much uncertainty.

“It doesn’t feel resolved at all,” the program director said. “I’ll be very happy to see my colleagues and make a little progress. But it’s not like we feel relieved. We worry that we’re just going to be used again in three weeks, if nothing is resolved.”

Work also has piled up in the Bureau of Prisons. All but 3 percent of employees were required to report to work, but those returning Monday have mixed feelings.

In the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission office, where employees file harassment and discrimination cases complaints, one counselor said 150 to 200 cases will be waiting when they return.

“It’s going to be crazy,” the counselor said, requesting anonymity because they did not have permission to speak with the media. “I expect to have at least 300 emails waiting for me. The cases may have been placed on hold, but the harassment has been allowed to continue while we were gone.”

At Coleman penitentiary in Florida, Joe Rojas, union president, said several employees quit during the shutdown, including a secretary hired days before it began.

“There is a lot of work piled up on his desk that someone is going to have to handle,” Rojas said. “When you start a job, you don’t expect them to say, ‘By the way, we aren’t going to pay you for this.’ ”

 

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Backlogs, deadlines and a massive bureaucratic reboot await federal workers after shutdown’s end"

  Reveal hidden contents

An avalanche of emails, backlogged permits, lapsed contracts and stalled payments to low-income Americans will face the hundreds of thousands of federal employees who return to work Monday.

For 35 days, they waited out the shutdown of nine Cabinet agencies and dozens of smaller ones. Now, they’ll face a massive bureaucratic reboot.

A return to normal operations could take weeks or even months. The National Park Service will need to restore basic amenities at hundreds of parks and monuments, removing accumulated trash and plowing multiple feet of snow. The Bureau of Indian Affairs must quickly issue grants to head off food shortages and a health-care crisis for Native American tribal members whose funding was cut off.

Inspectors returning from furlough to the National Transportation Safety Board will have to decide which of the almost 100 rail, plane and highway crashes to investigate first. And the Internal Revenue Service will race to train employees to implement changes to the tax code and hire thousands of temporary workers for tax season.

“I’m so ready to go back to work,” said Laura Barmby, an international trade specialist with the Commerce Department. She was so anxious to dig into her backlog she planned to log in to her computer from home on Sunday.

Barmby’s immediate concern is a blown deadline for a prestigious presidential awards program for exporters, “a big deal in my little world,” she said. After that, she intends to contact a group of companies advising the U.S. government on an upcoming trade pact with the United Kingdom to reschedule multiple missed meetings.

The first order of business for her and more than 350,000 others who spent the shutdown at home will be simple office tasks, like new passwords for computers. Timecards will need filling out, so payroll staffs know who was furloughed, worked without pay, called in sick, earned overtime or a combination.

Then there will be the reorganizing. After the shutdown was announced in December, agencies had four hours to close. Employees had just enough time to drop off work cellphones and laptops and record voice mail greetings. Many returning workers will find their offices in a holiday time warp. As of Friday, a Christmas tree and Hanukkah menorah still adorned the darkened, fifth-floor reception area of the Merit Systems Protection Board, a personnel court for civil servants in downtown Washington. Vice Chairman Mark Robbins said he’s had no staff to take them down.

New voice mail greetings will have to be recorded, announcing the reopening. Programs will need to be restarted, a process that can involve many layers of bureaucracy and boxes to be checked. Private contractors may have reassigned employees who had been working on projects put on hold during the shutdown, said David Berteau, president and chief executive of the Professional Services Council, which represents workers at roughly 400 private government contractors.

“It may take days to get started,” he said. “We have no experience at starting back up after five weeks . . . You have to make sure that the funds are still available before you can start the contract again. And everybody’s going to be trying to do it at once.”

Even employees who are anxious to get back to work say they feel paralyzed by what comes next.

When she steps into her office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center on Monday morning, astrophysicist Julie McEnery knows exactly what she’ll do first: water her plants. But then?

“I’m scared to even think about it,” she said. “The amount of work isn’t less, and we’ve got a lot less time now to do it.”

As project scientist for the Fermi Space Telescope, which surveys the cosmos using the highest-energy form of light, McEnery was called into Goddard a couple of times this month to take care of specific tasks related to the maintenance of the telescope. “I hope people know this was not a vacation,” she said. “It was very discouraging . . . We’re not all going to arrive back at work Monday bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

To boost morale, several agencies are planning hero’s welcomes for their staffs. The Peace Corps is holding an official event for returning employees starting at 7:30 a.m. Monday.

But many workers say they’re still anxious. They won’t see the back pay they’re owed until later this week. And President Trump has threatened another closure in three weeks if his demands for border wall funding aren’t met.

“It’s a reprieve,” said Gary Morton, president of AFGE Council 238, a union representing about 9,000 Environmental Protection Agency employees around the country, “but how much will we be able to accomplish before we have to start worrying about shutdown procedures again if they don’t reach a deal?”

Several federal managers said their agencies still cannot issue or announce new grants with the uncertainty of such a short-term budget. A senior manager at Homeland Security who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to speak publicly said he is allowing his staff to work from home until they have back pay cash in hand.

For offices in which staffs were essentially entirely furloughed, the return to normal operations could be particularly slow.

The EPA, for example, must now update its enforcement actions database, which has sat idle for more than a month, along with other key computer registries and air and water permits across the country, a senior administration official said. Agency experts had stopped certifying that new auto models meet U.S. air standards, slowing Fiat Chrysler’s plan to bring in a new model of a heavy-duty commercial work truck, officials said.

The Food and Drug Administration will start taking new drug and medical device applications, but agency officials acknowledge they may not fully catch up for almost a year.

Then there will be the physical messes to clean up .

At Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state, where no snow has been plowed since before Christmas, staffers must clear a highway stretching several miles uphill 2,500 feet in elevation to the main visitor center, along with large parking lot now covered by at least three feet of snow, with seven-foot drifts. Park officials announced Saturday that visitors should be able to reach Longmire, where the park’s hotel and museum are located, Sunday. But they cautioned it “may take many days” to restore access to the main visitor center and other high-elevation attractions.

A major cleanup awaits the staff at Sagamore Hill National Historic Site in New York, where a fire started in the gift shop late last month. On Monday, Park Service staff will continue working through the damage to document what has been lost and begin cleaning up.

The IRS told lawmakers last week that the agency will be buried in millions of unanswered taxpayer letters, weeks behind schedule on training and short thousands of new employees for this tax season, according to two House aides who were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

The National Taxpayer Advocate Service a government watchdog group that oversees the tax collector, told House staffers it will likely take a year for the IRS to run normally again, the aides said.

The reopening of the Smithsonian scheduled for Tuesday will mean much more than the return of visitors. Deadlines for upcoming exhibitions have passed. The National Gallery of Art has been unable to prepare for its much-anticipated Tintoretto show, set to open March 10. It’s the highlight of its spring calendar — the first North American retrospective of the Venetian artist — and the staff is worried about a potential delay.

Three other exhibitions have been postponed because work on the installations couldn’t be done: “Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence” at the National Portrait Gallery (set to open March 1) “Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths” at the National Museum of African Art (Feb. 27) and the Smithsonian Gardens’ popular orchid display, planned this year for the Kogod Courtyard at the NPG and Smithsonian American Art Museum. (Feb. 2). New opening dates have not been announced.

Federally funded science research could take a long time to recover too, scientists said. At the National Science Foundation, there’s a backlog of nearly 2,000 research grants waiting to be reviewed, on subjects ranging from cyberinfrastructure to earth sciences. More than 100 panels of outside scientists were canceled during the shutdown. Rescheduling them will be a massive undertaking.

“The impacts are going take some time to sort out,” said Benjamin Corb, spokesman for the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. “It is likely that the scientific enterprise won’t truly know what the impact was for months.”

A program director for the NSF, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly, said the agency’s reopening brings much uncertainty.

“It doesn’t feel resolved at all,” the program director said. “I’ll be very happy to see my colleagues and make a little progress. But it’s not like we feel relieved. We worry that we’re just going to be used again in three weeks, if nothing is resolved.”

Work also has piled up in the Bureau of Prisons. All but 3 percent of employees were required to report to work, but those returning Monday have mixed feelings.

In the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission office, where employees file harassment and discrimination cases complaints, one counselor said 150 to 200 cases will be waiting when they return.

“It’s going to be crazy,” the counselor said, requesting anonymity because they did not have permission to speak with the media. “I expect to have at least 300 emails waiting for me. The cases may have been placed on hold, but the harassment has been allowed to continue while we were gone.”

At Coleman penitentiary in Florida, Joe Rojas, union president, said several employees quit during the shutdown, including a secretary hired days before it began.

“There is a lot of work piled up on his desk that someone is going to have to handle,” Rojas said. “When you start a job, you don’t expect them to say, ‘By the way, we aren’t going to pay you for this.’ ”

 

Yup. Things are going to be crazy. I think they locked us out of the servers which means a call to the help desk where I will be # 1,231,834 in the que

[nvmbr02]

On 1/27/2019 at 6:44 AM, fransalley said:

The Super Bowl is next week.  I live in Atlanta and we are expecting major air traffic.  I wonder if that had anything to do with it as well.

Generally before a major event like the super bowl meeting are held for weeks beforehand to work out traffic patterns and ensure that traffic flows smoothly. All the event planning for this year was cancelled due to the shutdown. They are likely rescheduling meeting for this week and pulling from past events to come up with a new plan. Safety will not be compromised, but the air traffic system may not be as efficient as it can be. 

[Briefly]

On 1/25/2019 at 12:59 PM, fraurosena said:

It sounds like the presidunce is caving. Yet another promise he hasn't kept -- remember the No CAVE tweet from a few days ago?

 

I think he did blink.  He is a bully and not used to people standing up to him.  In many ways, that is what happened.  

Yes, @ViolaSebastian I think you are right.  Part two in 3 weeks.  And then he will spin it like he reopened the government, and the bad democrats are the problem.  Like he tried to do this time.  Like the link that @AmazonGrace posted, the one from the GOP blaming the bad democrats!

@fransalley I think you have a good idea and I hope everybody stocks up as much as they can.

[Ozlsn]

1 hour ago, onekidanddone said:

Yup. Things are going to be crazy. I think they locked us out of the servers which means a call to the help desk where I will be # 1,231,834 in the que

So is anyone likely to be paid overtime while this stuff gets sorted out?  Because they should get overtime as well as backpay for additional hours worked - just to emphasise that shutting the government is extremely costly and should not be used as a weapon.  Other things I would like to see - lower quintile tax returns processed preferentially over higher quintile ones until they've caught up, Congress pay withheld until the paychecks of all the furloughed workers is processed and distributed and, if Trump and Congress are so incautious as to go down this path again in three weeks, every furloughed worker who is able to forming a human ring around the building and instituting a "no one in, no one out" policy until they come to an agreement.

[fransalley]

15 minutes ago, Ozlsn said:

So is anyone likely to be paid overtime while this stuff gets sorted out?  Because they should get overtime as well as backpay for additional hours worked - just to emphasise that shutting the government is extremely costly and should not be used as a weapon.  Other things I would like to see - lower quintile tax returns processed preferentially over higher quintile ones until they've caught up, Congress pay withheld until the paychecks of all the furloughed workers is processed and distributed and, if Trump and Congress are so incautious as to go down this path again in three weeks, every furloughed worker who is able to forming a human ring around the building and instituting a "no one in, no one out" policy until they come to an agreement.

I asked my husband, an IRS worker, if he thought they’d be working overtime.  His answer, “What do you think?” said with a smile.

[Drala]

Chief of Staff MIck Mulvaney says he thinks Trump is prepared to wage another shutdown fight if he doesn't like the deal he gets from congressional negotiators.  "Look what you made me do,"  Trump is saying to the Democrats who blocked his demand for wall funding.  "It could happen again."  I'm feeling like someone caught in a cycle of domestic violence.  Media commentary about how Nancy Pelosi whipped Trump's ass makes me nervous, as if putting salt in the wound could provoke yet another round of violence.  That's how abuse of power works to demoralize its victims, by creating a chronic and not entirely irrational fear the crazy bastard will almost certainly go off again.  This is why Trump likes to be unpredictable--it keeps people off balance.   I hope the Democrats remain unified in their strategy to rein in this psychopath.

[AmazonGrace]

Could have paid for the wall with what the shutdown cost

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘It feels like we are still hostages’: Federal contractors who lost health insurance during shutdown remain in limbo"

Spoiler

Janice Morgan, a federal contractor out of work because of the government shutdown, spent part of January fearing that she might finally lose her husband, Milton, to his battle with multiple sclerosis. He was in intensive care. An infection had sent his heart rate and blood pressure soaring. And when she tried nine days ago to fill his prescription for a $7,600-a-month medication, another blow came: Her insurance coverage had been canceled.

Morgan called her boss, the president of Unispec Enterprises, a contracting firm that provides personnel to government agencies. He told her that the shutdown had left him unable to pay the company’s premiums. Soon, all 75 of Unispec’s technical writers, data analysts and economists — most of whom have their coverage through the firm — would learn of the lapse in an email.

“In 15 years, I’ve never once missed a payroll,” Wesley McClure, Unispec’s founder and president, said in an interview. “I’ve never once been without insurance, either for me or my employees, but that’s where we are.”

With the shutdown now over, Morgan, 62, is reporting back to her job Monday as an administrative planner for the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. But the mile marker of reopening federal offices belies the continued suffering and long-term financial damage on the legions of federal contractors whose lost wages may never be reimbursed. In the case of ­Unispec, health insurance remains in limbo, and the next full paycheck may still be four weeks away.

How the shutdown so quickly shredded the personal safety net of employees at Unispec reflects the razor-thin profit margin and unsettled nature of business for government contracting firms and their employees.

Relied upon for decades to depress growth in the government’s hiring of civil servants, federal contractors have become an auxiliary force that often does much of the same work as rank-and-file government staff, but with secondhand job security.

Unlike the 800,000 career federal employees who have been promised full back pay in coming days, government contractors — who are thought to number in the millions — have no legal claim to the five weeks of lost wages. And because Unispec cannot pay its employees until it has billed the government and received payment for their work, it will be another four full weeks, Feb. 28, before Morgan is eligible to receive a complete paycheck, McClure said.

And in the government’s temporary reopening, even that is no certainty. President Trump has set a new deadline, Feb. 15, for Congress to deliver funding for his proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall. Without the funding, he has warned, the government could shut down again. 

“It feels like we are still hostages,” Morgan said. “I’m just so happy to be going back to work and to be able to get on with our lives because I need our health insurance to fill these prescriptions. But who knows if this will all happen again in three weeks.”

Morgan’s husband returned home from the hospital on Jan. 19. But his supply of the costly medication that keeps his multiple sclerosis in check, a drug covered under her policy, will last only until Friday, she said. Although Medicare pays for some of his medical expenses, the drug is not covered under that program.

She isn’t the only Unispec employee affected by the lapse in coverage.

A 27-year-old analyst is paying only half his January utility bills, fearing he otherwise might be unable to afford his prescription antidepressant. A 35-year-old writer with asthma and a history of pneumonia canceled her gym membership during the shutdown to save money and is afraid to jog outside and risk getting sick. And a 39-year-old program manager recovering from a car accident that totaled her Toyota CRV in December has canceled doctor visits.

Morgan has worked for 22 years as a program associate and project manager at the pipeline and hazardous materials agency in the U.S. Department of Transportation — first for other contractors and then for Unispec after the firm won the contract to help staff the office more than 10 years ago.

Since then, dozens of its employees have filled cubicles across the agency, reviewing budgets on pipeline safety and analyzing data on hazardous spills by trucking companies. Unispec employees now even book the appointments and write the speeches of the office’s director, a presidential appointee, according to McClure and agency documents.

A graduate of Howard University, McClure entered the workforce himself as a government contractor. He decided in his 30s to start a business, a goal since high school. 

As a teenager, he had picked out a name for the enterprise — ­Unispec — that would fit right into the faceless world of government contracting.

“I wanted something recession proof — a binding contract with the U.S. government, you figure that’s worth something,” he said.

Over 15 years, McClure banked on the promise that the government would always pay up, borrowing and stretching to grow the company. After a decade, his employees had worked for over 10 federal agencies. For a time, one contract with the Federal Aviation Administration for 125 office workers had pushed his payroll to over 200.

Then, last year, Unispec was underbid and lost the FAA work. With the company bleeding money on overhead, it moved out of an office it had just rented. McClure downsized to a corner of a ­WeWork shared office space.

Unispec was not prepared for the complete interruption of cash flow that the shutdown brought, after Trump abruptly walked away from an agreement in December to keep the government running.

The company operates with little cushion, and McClure had not pushed the government for early reimbursement for Unispec’s November work, which would typically be paid at the end of December. When it came time for ­Unispec’s holiday party on Dec. 17, five days before the shutdown, McClure announced raises and bonuses, expecting he would be reimbursed before New Year’s.

Instead, with his corporate credit line of $1 million almost maxed out and no revenue from nearly the last two months of work, the government shut down on Dec. 22. 

By early January, McClure was scrambling to keep Unispec afloat. Rent, liability insurance, health-care premiums, business loans and even a LinkedIn bill for a recruiting page were all coming due.

He used his personal American Express card to pay creditors who would accept it, he said. A father of five, he planned for no paycheck for himself, and he placed the mortgage on his family’s one-story Maryland home in forbearance, he said.

“I was doing what I could,” McClure said. “I knew I could live on credit cards until the end of February. But there were bills I just couldn’t pay.”

On Jan. 10, he couldn’t cover the company’s $60,000 monthly premium to CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. McClure said he attempted to persuade the company to push the payment back until after the shutdown’s end.

The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Sitting at home after 9 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 21, McClure typed out an email on his phone to employees.

“After negotiating with CareFirst for weeks since this very painful government shutdown, we regret to announce that, due to lack of payment, our group health insurance was terminated on Thursday (January 17th) effective 12/31/2018,” it began. McClure wrote that employees could be reimbursed for health costs after coverage was restored, a belief based on conversations he had with the insurer, and he ended the email with: “This pains me to send. I only hope this is over soon.”

In the interview, McClure said CareFirst initially told him it could take two to three weeks for benefits to resume after the shutdown’s end. On Friday, hours after Trump and lawmakers came to an agreement to fund the government, CareFirst issued a news release saying it would work with members to “potentially provide relief,” and McClure said he received a call from the company inquiring about how it might help.

Unispec was not alone in struggling to manage the lack of cash flow. Many contractors had warned employees that health insurance policies would be at risk beginning Feb. 1 if the shutdown continued. Even more would have faced difficult choices beyond that.

DB Consulting, a larger federal staffing provider based in Maryland, maxed out its $5 million credit line last week, Vice President Shawn Boyd said in an interview. The company applied for a $600,000 increase to keep paying wages and benefits for contractors still required to work during the shutdown in support of ongoing missions for NASA, Boyd said. 

“After February, I don’t know if we’d make it,” he said.

A Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce survey of its membership during the second half of the shutdown revealed that some firms had already laid off workers, said Barbara Ashe, who runs the Chamber’s government contracting programs. And with over a month of lost revenue, every contractor will struggle for the rest of the year, Ashe said, especially smaller companies that tend to operate on thinner margins.

“The shutdown has completely wiped out all of their profits,” Ashe said. “Just to get out of the hole, you’re going to basically work the whole year to get back to zero.” 

Ashe said the Chamber has been urging Congress to pass a bill securing back pay for federal contractors. But even identifying how many employees lost wages would be difficult.

The federal government maintains no comprehensive database of contract employees paid with federal dollars. A Washington Post analysis found that nearly 10,000 companies had active contracts with the federal government at some point during the shutdown. More than 6,000 of those are considered small businesses. 

During the shutdown, two ­Unispec employees left for the private sector, McClure said. He said he is concerned that even speaking publicly about the hardship Unispec faced could hinder his ability to hire workers and win contracts. 

“But I just never saw us here,” he said. “For the first time, this company will have zero revenue for an entire month — zero — that’s just something no business can fully plan for.”

 

[Audrey2]

22 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"‘It feels like we are still hostages’: Federal contractors who lost health insurance during shutdown remain in limbo"

  Reveal hidden contents

Janice Morgan, a federal contractor out of work because of the government shutdown, spent part of January fearing that she might finally lose her husband, Milton, to his battle with multiple sclerosis. He was in intensive care. An infection had sent his heart rate and blood pressure soaring. And when she tried nine days ago to fill his prescription for a $7,600-a-month medication, another blow came: Her insurance coverage had been canceled.

Morgan called her boss, the president of Unispec Enterprises, a contracting firm that provides personnel to government agencies. He told her that the shutdown had left him unable to pay the company’s premiums. Soon, all 75 of Unispec’s technical writers, data analysts and economists — most of whom have their coverage through the firm — would learn of the lapse in an email.

“In 15 years, I’ve never once missed a payroll,” Wesley McClure, Unispec’s founder and president, said in an interview. “I’ve never once been without insurance, either for me or my employees, but that’s where we are.”

With the shutdown now over, Morgan, 62, is reporting back to her job Monday as an administrative planner for the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. But the mile marker of reopening federal offices belies the continued suffering and long-term financial damage on the legions of federal contractors whose lost wages may never be reimbursed. In the case of ­Unispec, health insurance remains in limbo, and the next full paycheck may still be four weeks away.

How the shutdown so quickly shredded the personal safety net of employees at Unispec reflects the razor-thin profit margin and unsettled nature of business for government contracting firms and their employees.

Relied upon for decades to depress growth in the government’s hiring of civil servants, federal contractors have become an auxiliary force that often does much of the same work as rank-and-file government staff, but with secondhand job security.

Unlike the 800,000 career federal employees who have been promised full back pay in coming days, government contractors — who are thought to number in the millions — have no legal claim to the five weeks of lost wages. And because Unispec cannot pay its employees until it has billed the government and received payment for their work, it will be another four full weeks, Feb. 28, before Morgan is eligible to receive a complete paycheck, McClure said.

And in the government’s temporary reopening, even that is no certainty. President Trump has set a new deadline, Feb. 15, for Congress to deliver funding for his proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall. Without the funding, he has warned, the government could shut down again. 

“It feels like we are still hostages,” Morgan said. “I’m just so happy to be going back to work and to be able to get on with our lives because I need our health insurance to fill these prescriptions. But who knows if this will all happen again in three weeks.”

Morgan’s husband returned home from the hospital on Jan. 19. But his supply of the costly medication that keeps his multiple sclerosis in check, a drug covered under her policy, will last only until Friday, she said. Although Medicare pays for some of his medical expenses, the drug is not covered under that program.

She isn’t the only Unispec employee affected by the lapse in coverage.

A 27-year-old analyst is paying only half his January utility bills, fearing he otherwise might be unable to afford his prescription antidepressant. A 35-year-old writer with asthma and a history of pneumonia canceled her gym membership during the shutdown to save money and is afraid to jog outside and risk getting sick. And a 39-year-old program manager recovering from a car accident that totaled her Toyota CRV in December has canceled doctor visits.

Morgan has worked for 22 years as a program associate and project manager at the pipeline and hazardous materials agency in the U.S. Department of Transportation — first for other contractors and then for Unispec after the firm won the contract to help staff the office more than 10 years ago.

Since then, dozens of its employees have filled cubicles across the agency, reviewing budgets on pipeline safety and analyzing data on hazardous spills by trucking companies. Unispec employees now even book the appointments and write the speeches of the office’s director, a presidential appointee, according to McClure and agency documents.

A graduate of Howard University, McClure entered the workforce himself as a government contractor. He decided in his 30s to start a business, a goal since high school. 

As a teenager, he had picked out a name for the enterprise — ­Unispec — that would fit right into the faceless world of government contracting.

“I wanted something recession proof — a binding contract with the U.S. government, you figure that’s worth something,” he said.

Over 15 years, McClure banked on the promise that the government would always pay up, borrowing and stretching to grow the company. After a decade, his employees had worked for over 10 federal agencies. For a time, one contract with the Federal Aviation Administration for 125 office workers had pushed his payroll to over 200.

Then, last year, Unispec was underbid and lost the FAA work. With the company bleeding money on overhead, it moved out of an office it had just rented. McClure downsized to a corner of a ­WeWork shared office space.

Unispec was not prepared for the complete interruption of cash flow that the shutdown brought, after Trump abruptly walked away from an agreement in December to keep the government running.

The company operates with little cushion, and McClure had not pushed the government for early reimbursement for Unispec’s November work, which would typically be paid at the end of December. When it came time for ­Unispec’s holiday party on Dec. 17, five days before the shutdown, McClure announced raises and bonuses, expecting he would be reimbursed before New Year’s.

Instead, with his corporate credit line of $1 million almost maxed out and no revenue from nearly the last two months of work, the government shut down on Dec. 22. 

By early January, McClure was scrambling to keep Unispec afloat. Rent, liability insurance, health-care premiums, business loans and even a LinkedIn bill for a recruiting page were all coming due.

He used his personal American Express card to pay creditors who would accept it, he said. A father of five, he planned for no paycheck for himself, and he placed the mortgage on his family’s one-story Maryland home in forbearance, he said.

“I was doing what I could,” McClure said. “I knew I could live on credit cards until the end of February. But there were bills I just couldn’t pay.”

On Jan. 10, he couldn’t cover the company’s $60,000 monthly premium to CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. McClure said he attempted to persuade the company to push the payment back until after the shutdown’s end.

The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Sitting at home after 9 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 21, McClure typed out an email on his phone to employees.

“After negotiating with CareFirst for weeks since this very painful government shutdown, we regret to announce that, due to lack of payment, our group health insurance was terminated on Thursday (January 17th) effective 12/31/2018,” it began. McClure wrote that employees could be reimbursed for health costs after coverage was restored, a belief based on conversations he had with the insurer, and he ended the email with: “This pains me to send. I only hope this is over soon.”

In the interview, McClure said CareFirst initially told him it could take two to three weeks for benefits to resume after the shutdown’s end. On Friday, hours after Trump and lawmakers came to an agreement to fund the government, CareFirst issued a news release saying it would work with members to “potentially provide relief,” and McClure said he received a call from the company inquiring about how it might help.

Unispec was not alone in struggling to manage the lack of cash flow. Many contractors had warned employees that health insurance policies would be at risk beginning Feb. 1 if the shutdown continued. Even more would have faced difficult choices beyond that.

DB Consulting, a larger federal staffing provider based in Maryland, maxed out its $5 million credit line last week, Vice President Shawn Boyd said in an interview. The company applied for a $600,000 increase to keep paying wages and benefits for contractors still required to work during the shutdown in support of ongoing missions for NASA, Boyd said. 

“After February, I don’t know if we’d make it,” he said.

A Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce survey of its membership during the second half of the shutdown revealed that some firms had already laid off workers, said Barbara Ashe, who runs the Chamber’s government contracting programs. And with over a month of lost revenue, every contractor will struggle for the rest of the year, Ashe said, especially smaller companies that tend to operate on thinner margins.

“The shutdown has completely wiped out all of their profits,” Ashe said. “Just to get out of the hole, you’re going to basically work the whole year to get back to zero.” 

Ashe said the Chamber has been urging Congress to pass a bill securing back pay for federal contractors. But even identifying how many employees lost wages would be difficult.

The federal government maintains no comprehensive database of contract employees paid with federal dollars. A Washington Post analysis found that nearly 10,000 companies had active contracts with the federal government at some point during the shutdown. More than 6,000 of those are considered small businesses. 

During the shutdown, two ­Unispec employees left for the private sector, McClure said. He said he is concerned that even speaking publicly about the hardship Unispec faced could hinder his ability to hire workers and win contracts. 

“But I just never saw us here,” he said. “For the first time, this company will have zero revenue for an entire month — zero — that’s just something no business can fully plan for.”

 

Yet again, it seems like Trump does his best to screw the small businesses who work for him. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Lasting damage remains from Trump’s shutdown folly"

Spoiler

Slicing through the relief that the longest U.S. government shutdown has finally stopped is the lasting-damage reality of President Trump’s reprehensible folly.

Providing back pay to the 800,000 federal employees who went without wages since before Christmas will not make them whole. Sacrifices were made that cannot be fixed. Many federal contractors are poorer after going without income for the 35-day partial shutdown. The ripple effect rolled over to workers such as the food-truck vendors who count on lunchtime business. Personal stories of despair abound. The shutdown cost the economy $6 billion, according to Standard & Poor’s, a financial rating company. That’s more than the $5.7 billion Trump has demanded from taxpayers for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The harm goes beyond the tangible, beyond money lost.

Trump’s decision to close much of the government has weakened confidence in all of it. How stable is an institution that can be seriously damaged because Congress would not approve money for a wall that Trump promised Mexico would fund? How foolish this nation must look to those who once thought this a place of sanity. His threat to shut down the government again in three weeks if he doesn’t get wall funding tempers any relief with pangs of doubt, worry and apprehension, particularly for those who suffered so much at his hands.

The shutdown is the president’s legacy, and more evidence that he is unfit for the office.

Trump proudly owned the closure from the start and now it covers his bolshie persona with a narcissistic stink. For all his New York bluster, Trump was beaten by a gentle lady from California. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) is not the winner. This shameful saga has no winner. The United States, its people and its reputation are the losers because of Trump.

The damage is demonstrated by folks such as Charles M. Smith.

Smith, of Bowie, Md., is a proud 32-year Internal Revenue Service employee. Now, he said, “my public service heart and spirit are both broken.”

Smith had intended to grow his annuity by retiring after age 62. But then came Trump. “This is my fifth shutdown,” Smith said. “This will be my last. … This madness happened, and now I want out.” Smith, 59, has decided to retire early.

In conversations and by email, he discussed his decision and his youthful eagerness to work for Uncle Sam.

“Over time I found great pride and satisfaction working for the government. I believed that I was making a valuable contribution to my country by choosing public service,” he said. He remembered learning about President John F. Kennedy’s call to service. “ ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ I answered President Kennedy’s call and I dedicated my whole career to public service,” Smith said. “But President Trump has changed all that. … The rhetoric and falsehoods spoken by Mr. Trump and his allies have changed everything.”

Smith’s attitude also changed over the course of two days last week. When we initially connected with him on Thursday, he said he would retire in June, driven out of government, disgusted and frustrated by the shutdown. He didn’t want to be named in an article “because of possible retaliation from the administration or others.”

Smith is no longer afraid to be identified. His early retirement, he decided, will be even earlier than planned. He will file for retirement when he gets back to work. “The news that the Government will open for three weeks does nothing for my broken heart and spirit,” he said on Twitter on Friday night. “As soon as I can I will submit my retirement application with a date of 2/28/19.”

You can thank Trump for driving a dedicated public servant out of public service.

“My Country which I grew up to love is not the same,” Smith said by email. “We are more divided and polarized than ever before. Our Government is broken and is not functioning. This Pawn is leaving this Political Chess game that occurs almost every year.”

This shutdown hit Smith harder than the others.

“I’m done with this merry-go-round of uncertainty,” he said during an interview. “I no longer feel valued as a federal employee. … I’ve lost that passion. … I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve been crying over this ... and because what I feel the current shutdown has taken away from me. … I’ve lost the dignity of public service. I’ve lost the honor.”

Smith is not alone. The financial and emotional toll that Trump’s shutdown has taken on federal employees and others is a national disgrace. We all lose when federal employees lose the dignity of public service.

 

[Briefly]

His threats about executive powers really scare me.  I think he really does think he's president for life.  We have a dictator wannabe in the White House.

[nvmbr02]

Is anyone else frustrated with how they are handling the backpay situation? I appreciate that they are trying to get pay out a quickly as possible but I feel like it is going to be a mess and difficult for hourly employees to double check the payments to be sure they correct without issuing a LES with the payments. I hope they at least issue them at some point. 

[onekidanddone]

19 minutes ago, nvmbr02 said:

Is anyone else frustrated with how they are handling the backpay situation? I appreciate that they are trying to get pay out a quickly as possible but I feel like it is going to be a mess and difficult for hourly employees to double check the payments to be sure they correct without issuing a LES with the payments. I hope they at least issue them at some point. 

Very good advice. I didn’t start work today because I already had a medical appointment scheduled. I’ll see what happens tomorrow. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘I came back to 4,459 emails’: Washington is back to work, and in a tizzy"

Spoiler

Washington is back, baby! De-ice your Outlook calendar! Crack open that musty inbox! Grease your creaky calves by racewalking to the Metro and, whoops, there’s a woman in medical distress on a stalled train at Farragut North. Single-tracking during morning rush hour! Ah, the warm embrace of routine.

The longest government shutdown in our history is over, and it’s Monday morning in America. Listen to the buzz of activity in Washington’s brutalist honeycomb of agencies, associations, departments, foundations, commissions, councils, institutes, bureaus and boards!

What national priority shall we tackle first?

“There were many of us going, Oh, God, what is my PIN?”

Laurel Bryant works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, up in Silver Spring. The mood Monday was joyous, like a big family reunion — if your family had to suddenly drop everything and scatter for five weeks. Everyone’s equipment had to be left behind, and passwords were forgotten, but the wizards from IT were circulating, checking in with everyone, asking if all was okay. Too many people were logging on at the same time to fill out their timecards, so the system kept crashing.

“I came back to 4,459 emails,” Bryant said. “I’m down to 4,222.”

It was barely past 11 a.m.

“I’ll get through it.”

Our soundtrack for the day was Sheila E.’s “The Glamorous Life,” blasted during the morning rush by the brass band at K Street and Connecticut Avenue. There were finally enough cars jamming up Georgia Avenue and Colesville Road that the honking was comfortingly continuous. The only thing on President Trump’s public schedule Monday was lunch with the vice president, though there was the usual errant tweeting about — let’s see here — the Bible, and about how the former CEO of Starbucks is dumb and gutless. Ah, routine!

On 20th Street NW, Peace Corps employees were greeted by boxes of Dunkin’ doughnuts, signs that said “THANK YOU FOR YOUR PUBLIC SERVICE,” and the rumor of champagne upstairs. Burnt coffee, the odor of productivity, floated on the breeze at L’Enfant Plaza, where local reporters ringed the escalators looking for bureaucrats to interrogate.

“Ma’am, are you back to work today?”

“Ma’am, are you back to work today?”

“Sir, are you back to work today?”

“Sir?”

The unsung functionaries of the federal government have become, momentarily, like capital Kardashians — though decidedly more demure.

“No, thank you.”

“I’m not interested.”

“I’m just trying to get back to work.”

“I kind of have someplace to be. Finally.”

Finally! Last week, before the reprieve, Washington was getting jittery. Federal workers were somehow both restless and complacent, like everyone was infected with cabin fever and senioritis. GS-14s, cushioned by savings, worried about their newer colleagues, the lesser-paid GS-7s, whose workplace diet is ramen and PB&J sandwiches. One attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency picked up additional hours at his second job, at Home Depot — which, he said, has given him higher-percentage raises over the years than the federal government. Office-plant parents actually came into work, during the shutdown, just to water the pothos and jade and ferns. (Without love, work ain’t much.)

Feds tried their hands at acting like retirees. “It was sort of a test run,” said Bryant, who plans to retire from NOAA next year with her husband. “Can we play in tandem together all day?” (Answer: Yes, thank God.)

Feds re-tiled their parents’ bathrooms, because Mom keeps complaining and Dad has bad knees.

Feds started to normalize the abnormal. Though she was furloughed for the entire stretch, Eleanor Marusiak got up every weekday at 6 a.m. and got dressed, to preserve a sense of normalcy. She Marie Kondo’d her house. She cooked a bunch of meals and froze them. She slipped her underworked dog-walker $50. By Monday, she was relieved to be back in her office at the EPA, along Pennsylvania Avenue, where Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler was greeting employees in the lobby like a host at Bob Evans.

You could still see the shutdown on people’s faces.

“People have this kind of ­vacation-hangover look,” said Marusiak, a procurement analyst for the EPA. “They look a little bit distant. And it’s very quiet. . . . It just feels — awkward. I don’t know why I’m using that word. It’s like we’ve all witnessed something, but people aren’t really talking about it.”

What did we witness? “Trumpcation” is a word that feds used at work on Monday — as in, “How was your Trumpcation?”

And what aren’t we talking about? The fact that the shutdown cost us twice as much as President Trump’s proposed border wall? Or is it the staggering amount of catching up the government has to do? Thousands of tons of snow needs to be cleared from the parking lots of national parks. The IRS has millions of unanswered letters to get through. Inspectors at the National Transportation Safety Board must pick which train, plane and automobile crashes to investigate first. At NOAA, the cartographers who chart the seas have new buoys and shipwrecks and coastal rock formations to account for.

It was a routine day, except not. One of the first things Dawn Smith noticed upon returning to work at the Department of Housing and Urban Development was the tinsel. And the candy canes. And the elaborate cardboard fireplace heaped with stockings, presents, a bejeweled wreath and a stuffed Santa Claus. The Christmas decorations were still up, an accidental memorial to lost time.

“We won first prize in the office decoration contest,” said Smith, an office administrator at HUD. “We won a pizza party, but haven’t had it yet, since everyone got furloughed.”

By the afternoon, the holiday decorations had been removed from the hallways, and HUD’s help desk had gotten 1,000 calls about computer issues. This is how the government wakes up.

Eleven months till next Christmas.

Three weeks, maybe, till the government goes back to sleep.

 

[GreyhoundFan]