President Trump’s decision to temporarily reopen the government with Congress may be good news for Washington, but federal employees and businesses say they’ll be picking up the pieces from the longest shutdown in U.S. history for quite a while.
The American Federation of Government Employees, a major labor union, urged any federal worker who toiled during the impasse to join a pending lawsuit that would ensure full back-pay, plus damages equal to minimum wage for hours worked and the full value of any overtime.
“While the agreement reached by the White House and Congress will put employees back to work temporarily and allow them to start getting paid, we will not stop fighting until we have full-year funding approved for all our agencies and until all employees are made whole for the income they have lost,” said AFGE national President J. David Cox Sr.
The Small Business Majority, a network of 58,000 small businesses, said it’s relieved by the deal but that firms face a long recovery.
Loan applications sent to the U.S. Small Business Administration were put on hold, businesses that contract with the government haven’t been paid and firms that cater to federal employees lost sales.
The group said any blip in earnings is an “existential blow” to a small businesses — and they may not recover anytime soon.
“While small businesses may benefit from an agreement that will temporarily reopen the entire federal government, it’s an inescapable fact that the partial government shutdown inflicted substantial damage on America’s small firms,” said John Arensmeyer, founder and CEO of the Small Business Majority.
The latest shutdown was unlike any other. Employees faced two full work cycles without paychecks, sending them to food pantries they might have once donated to but never thought they’d need themselves.
Others reportedly worried about lasting damage to their credit scores or how they’d catch up with missed housing payments.
Rep. T.J. Cox, California Democrat, said families in his district and across the U.S. were “forced to make painful decisions on rationing their health care, paying their rent and mortgages, and putting food on their tables.”
“The effects of which will be felt for years to come,” he said.
The decision to reopen the government should, however, forestall deeper pain, such as a rocky tax-filing season at the IRS or serious belt-tightening in the federal courts.
In the weeks ahead, those courts will have to sort through lawsuits that pose thorny questions about how federal agencies should treat their workers amid a shutdown.
Friday’s pact “comes as a great relief to our clients, who were severely impacted by the loss of an entire month’s income, that they will be getting paid for their time and devotion to their jobs,” said Michael Kator, a lawyer representing federal employees who sued for agency permission to stay home without being declared AWOL or pursue paying side gigs.
“Insofar as the lawsuit is concerned, however, they intend to proceed and seek to get a final ruling on the merits so that, perhaps, they will never be in this position again,” he said.
The political fallout of the shutdown may take longer to digest. Analysts say the GOP was particularly wounded by the shutdown, as polls showed Mr. Trump and his party shouldering the larger share of blame, yet there will be many twists and storylines before the 2020 elections.
Democrats, meanwhile, said they felt bad about the shutdown’s effects but didn’t regret their approach to the standoff, which ended Friday with a stopgap funding bill that will reopen affected agencies through Feb. 15, though it doesn’t include money for Mr. Trump’s border wall.
“For a month, the whole country’s been facing all this uncertainty, so it’s hard to feel good about it,” said Rep. Dan Kildee, Michigan Democrat. “But it is reaffirming to know that the position we took was the right position, and it was a position that held.”
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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