On the sixth day of the ongoing partial government shutdown, President Donald Trump took to Twitter and suggested thousands of federal employees temporarily out of work are simply pawns in a larger political game. Anyone surprised to see the president drag the voting preferences of furloughed workers into this fight hasn’t been paying much attention to Trump’s relationship with those who do the government’s work. Roughly three quarters of the government’s funding has already been appropriated by Congress, leaving only certain agencies closed for the shutdown. An estimated 420,000 federal employees are working without pay, and another 380,000 have been furloughed, meaning they are out of work for the duration. It would require an act of Congress to retroactively pay both groups of workers once the government reopens, as lawmakers have typically done in the past.

Source: Huffington Post December 27, 2018 18:56 UTC