40-day shutdown of Department of Homeland Security has led to missed paychecks for civilian employees, threatens potential missed pay for servicemembers.
The 40-day shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security has led to several missed paychecks for the Coast Guard’s civilian employees and a “grim uncertainty” of potential missed pay for its military members.
It has prevented the service from paying more than 5,000 utility accounts, putting the Coast Guard’s critical infrastructure in “imminent danger” of widespread utility shutoffs and refusals of fuel deliveries. And it has stalled the processing of more than 16,000 merchant marine credentials, with the backlog growing by 300 per day.
Those are just some of the effects the funding lapse has had on the Coast Guard, which operates under the department in peacetime, the service’s vice commandant, Adm. Thomas Allan, told lawmakers on Wednesday.
“These realities erode the sacred trust our men and women have in the nation they serve,” Allan said in testimony to the House Committee on Homeland Security. “Every day the shutdown drags on moves us closer to a tipping point.”
It takes the Coast Guard two and a half days to recover from each day it is in a shutdown, he said, meaning if the shutdown were to end Wednesday, the service would not catch up with bills and other affected activities until July 3.
Negotiations to end the shutdown, which began on Feb. 14, took on more urgency this week as lawmakers pushed to resolve the impasse before leaving for a two-week recess on Friday. But a bipartisan deal has yet to emerge.
Senate Republicans sent a proposal to Democrats on Tuesday to fund the entirety of the department except for parts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement involved in the Trump administration’s deportation crackdown. Democrats, who have unsuccessfully offered bills to separate funding for the department from ICE and Customs and Border Protection, sent a counteroffer with ICE reforms on Wednesday morning, according to Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.
In the meantime, the Coast Guard has continued “to serve, because that is what our people have sworn to do,” Allan told lawmakers as he outlined the impact of the shutdown alongside officials from other department agencies.
“But a crew should never question whether the nation they protect will stand behind them and their families,” he added. “Stable funding for DHS is not simply a budgetary matter, it’s a matter of trust, readiness and national security.”
The shutdown has created an “unacceptable financial strain” on the Coast Guard’s civilian workforce, Allan said, and though service members have continued to get paid, the service is constantly unsure if it can make the next payroll for them.
Such uncertainty has affected mission readiness and likely caused people to question whether they want to be part of a military service that frequently gets impacted by government shutdowns, he told lawmakers.
“For the Coast Guard, this marks the third shutdown of this fiscal year,” Allan wrote in testimony submitted to the committee. “In total, for 85 of the last 176 days — for nearly half the year — our service has been without the funding necessary to operate and pay our people.”
The latest shutdown has left crews deployed on national security missions unable to get reimbursed for thousands of dollars of official expenses on their government travel cards — a personal debt that is an “unacceptable burden,” he wrote.
It has also crippled the Coast Guard’s ability to pay its many contractors and vendors, including companies that perform ship maintenance and are increasingly voicing their unwillingness to work without pay. The damage could be long-lasting, he said.
“What we worry about is that it’s not only a near-term impact, but as we bid for these contracts with these companies in the future, they’re not going to come to the Coast Guard, they’ll go to the Navy, they’ll go to the Marines,” Allan said.
The service has so far incurred more than $200 million in unpaid bills to industry partners, he said. Among them are missed payments for cloud and satellite communications services that threaten to sever vital command-and-control links, according to Allan.
It has also ceased activities that do not protect human life or property from imminent danger, including routine patrols and fisheries enforcement. Many preparations for this summer’s World Cup and America’s 250th birthday celebrations have also been paused, he said.
Republicans and Democrats continue to blame each other for the shutdown, which was triggered when a deal to provide full-year funding for the department unraveled following the killing of an American citizen by federal immigration agents in Minnesota.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday he would take a “good, hard look” at the Republican-proposed deal to end the partial government shutdown but added that “any deal they make, I’m pretty much not happy with it.”
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