Government funding difficulties create gloom for federal workers before Christmas

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Johnny Zuagar says he’s tried to hide his worries about a potential government shutdown from his three boys as he weighs how much to spend on Christmas presents.

“I’ve got to keep a poker face,” Zuagar, a statistician at the U.S. Census Bureau, said when thinking about his boys, ages 14, 12 and 6. “You’re just trying to take that worry off of your family.”

Like thousands of federal workers, Zuagar is navigating the holidays with the spirit of the season overtaken by an air of gloom and uncertainty.

The turbulent efforts in Congress to reach an agreement on funding the federal government has cast a cloud over the holidays for many federal workers facing possible furloughs in the days before Christmas. The House on Friday passed a three-month government spending bill just hours before a government shutdown, but its fate in the Senate was uncertain as the deadline loomed.

Many federal workers were already anxious about the possibility of future workforce reductions under the incoming Trump administration.

Zuagar, who is president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2782, which represents federal workers at the census, has lived through unexpected shutdowns before — including right before the holidays.

This time, it comes on the heels of promises from Trump and his allies that there will be sweeping cuts in the federal workforce.

“We really don’t know anymore,” Zuagar said during a telephone interview Friday, with hours to go before a midnight deadline to approve a spending measure to avoid furloughs. “Again, the rhetoric out there is that federal employees are the problem.”

The contentiousness of the current debate has left him wondering: “Are we the scapegoat for every ill and grievance in America?”

He says federal workers are worried not just about how long a potential shutdown could last, but also about what will happen after Trump takes office.

“They’re fearful of what’s to come, like this is the beginning of something, or they don’t care about us,” Zuagar said.

Jesus Soriano, president of the AFGE Local 3403 representing workers at the National Science Foundation and several other agencies, also said the budget difficulties in Congress feel different from those of previous years.

“I think Americans should know that history is being written as we speak,” Soriano said in an interview in Chevy Chase, Maryland, near the state’s border with the nation’s capital. “Americans need to decide what type of services the government should provide, whether we are talking about national security, the safety of our borders, the safety of our food, Social Security or others.”

Anxiety about furloughs from a government shutdown this time could be a prelude, Soriano said.

“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 afternoon.

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 in January. 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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Brian Witte, The Associated Press