WASHINGTON -- Jessica Sweet spent the federal government shutdown cutting back.To make ends meet, the Social Security claims specialist drank only one coffee a day, skipped meals, cut down on groceries and deferred paying some household bills.
She racked up spending on her credit card buying gas to get to work.With the longest shutdown ever coming to a close, Sweet and hundreds of thousands of other federal workers who missed paychecks will soon get some relief.But many are left feeling that their livelihoods served as political pawns in the fight between recalcitrant lawmakers in Washington and are asking themselves whether the battle was worth their sacrifices.
“It’s very frustrating to go through something like this,” said Sweet, who is a union steward of AFGE Local 3343 in New York.“It shakes the foundation of trust that we all place in our agencies and in the federal government to do the right thing.”The shutdown began on Oct.
1 after Democrats rejected a short-term funding fix and demanded that the bill include an extension of federal subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.Its end emerged when eight Democratic-aligned senators agreed to a deal to fund the government with no extension of the expiring subsidies.The shutdown created a cascade of troubles for many Americans.
Throughout the shutdown, at least 670,000 federal employees were furloughed, while about 730,000 others were working without pay, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.The plight of the federal workers was among several pressure points, along with flight disruptions and cuts to food aid, that in the end ratcheted up the pressure on lawmakers to come to an agreement to fund the government.
Throughout the six-week shutdown, officials in President Donald Trump's administration repeatedly used the federal workers as leverage to try to push Democrats to relent on their health care demands.The Republican president signaled that workers going unpaid wouldn't ...