Life looks grim for ‘non-essentials’ in US shutdown

WASHINGTON—As the clock ticked down to a US government shutdown at midnight on Friday, many federal workers were being told something nobody wants to hear: thank you, but you’re not essential.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Eddie Eitches, president of the branch of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) that represents HUD workers, checked a list of names of personnel who could continue to work if the government shut down.

“Probably 95 percent of staff are not on the list,” he told AFP.

Even Eitches wasn’t on it.

“Many people here live paycheck to paycheck and a shutdown will be devastating. We’ll be paid up to the pay period that ends today but not after that,” he said.

The AFGE has set up a contingency fund for HUD workers who fall on hard times during a shutdown, but Eitches said it probably would not go far.

According to a memo posted on HUD’s website, around 8,850 of the agency’s 9,700 employees would become “non-essential” if the government shuts down.

Only 435 out of nearly 1,800 staff at the Executive Office, which runs the White House, would be considered “essential,” including 15 people who work in the part of the White House where President Barack Obama and his family live.

At Vice President Joe Biden’s official residence, only one staff member would be considered “essential.”

In total, some 800,000 federal employees around the United States are expected to be deemed non-essential and ordered to take unpaid leave, or furloughed.

They will be expected to “shut down their office in no more than four hours” and go home until the shutdown is over. Some will also be asked to part with their work-issue BlackBerry mobile phones because of a series of laws called the Anti-Deficiency Act (ADA).

Under the ADA, which dates from the 19th century, the federal government cannot spend money it doesn’t have, and can only allow personnel to work who ensure the safety of humans or property, or allow the agency to continue to operate minimally.

Some 12,000 of the Department of Labor’s countrywide workforce of just over 16,000 have been deemed “non-essential.”

They will not only have to take unpaid leave but also have to hand in their government-issued BlackBerries and laptops if there is a shutdown, spokesperson Jaime Zapata told AFP.

“It’s government property and we know that the rules on this stuff are very specific. So, yes, we would be asking people to turn in or secure their government-issued equipment,” he said.

The ADA also stipulates that government agencies are barred from communicating with furloughed workers about official duties — which raises the question of how the workers would know when the shutdown is over — and bars workers from volunteering their services to the agency.

HUD workers will not be able to access their government emails from home, to ensure that they remain in compliance with ADA.

And Congressional offices were told in an official memo Thursday that they “may require furloughed employees to turn in their BlackBerries, laptops and cell phones and require furloughed employees to set an ‘out of office’ message on their email accounts” in the event of a shutdown.

To get around that, some members of Congress, including Democratic Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents Washington DC, have deemed all of their staff to be essential.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs Voice of America and other international broadcasting, has tried to “stay away from ‘you’re essential and you’re not,'” spokeswoman Barbara Brady told AFP.

“But we’ve had to tell people, mainly in administrative support, that they have not been excepted,” and will have to take unpaid leave if there is a shutdown, she said.

“It’s certainly not easy. We are really impacting people’s paychecks with those kinds of decisions,” Brady said.

The government faces the prospect of shutting down because Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on how much to cut the 2011 budget or where to cut it.

Republicans seized control of the House of Representatives in November on a promise to slash government spending — which they maintain they would be doing by cutting programs like family planning and several HUD programs, out of the 2011 budget.

“There’s a Kenyan proverb that states ‘When elephants fight, the grass gets destroyed,’ said Eitches.

“Democrats and Republicans are fighting and we, the federal workers, are getting destroyed. It’s very demoralizing,” he said.