Shutdown politics discourage federal workers
The federal workers showed up at their offices Monday morning. They collected their desk plants and food from break-room refrigerators. They shut down their government equipment. They went home to take aimless walks and wait.
But by the afternoon, hundreds of thousands of federal employees across the country were left with a stinging case of shutdown whiplash as politicians in Washington declared that the government closure was over. For now.
The Washington region has the highest number of federal workers, but government employees and contractors can be found in jobs across the country and the world. They are program managers at the country’s largest national forest in Alaska. They are studying the moon for NASA in Houston. They are examining Social Security claims in Kansas City.
On Monday afternoon, they fumed at both political parties, and said they were once again being made into sacrificial pawns in a badly played game of chess.
“What a joke,” said Domenic Ionta, a policy adviser at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in Washington.
“I blame everybody,” said Billy Young, a federal correctional officer in Texas.
Many workers still had fresh memories of the 16-day government shutdown in 2013, recalling how they had to plead with creditors and decide which bills to pay. While this shutdown lasted just three days — and only one workday for many — some federal workers said it had further frayed their faith in Congress, and made them second-guess the careers they had chosen.
“I’m a die-hard civil servant,” Young said. “The reason I got this job was for the stability, and for the past several years we haven’t had it.”
Uncertainties still loomed. Some furloughed workers said they still did not know when they would be going back to work. Others said they are worried they will find themselves back in the same position on Feb. 8, when the latest temporary compromise to fund the government expires.
“I’m not holding my breath,” said Paul M. Rinaldi, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, a labor union that represents 20,000 members, including 14,000 air traffic controllers. “You know and I know: Congress is not going to start working well tomorrow.”
Federal workers said the shutdown had loomed like a storm cloud over their lives for the past week, and that the protracted process of shutting down and reopening their offices, sending workers home and recalling them, was a waste of time and money.
One of the ironies of dysfunctional politics is that the government actually seems to be getting better at shutting itself down, said Tom Heutte, a program manager at the Tongass National Forest in Ketchikan, Alaska.
On Monday, the employees in his Forest Service office showed up to work, and Heutte said they all followed instructions to conduct an “orderly shutdown.” They read a four-page document, signed a furlough order and were then told to go home and not do any work, Heutte said. The process took about an hour.
“Everybody knew what the drill was,” he said. “These things kind of dump on our morale.”