Trump’s threat to cut back pay for federal workers would be ‘devastating’ in KC
As thousands of federal workers in the Kansas City area grapple with a federal government shutdown, the Trump administration on Tuesday threw even more uncertainty into the equation.
A draft memo circulating by the Trump administration threatens to cut back pay for furloughed federal workers, according to Axios and numerous other outlets. Furloughed workers were expecting to be reimbursed at the end of the shutdown.
The memo comes as federal workers across Kansas City, such as the Department of Labor, have either been sent home or are working without pay. It also came just hours before roughly 5,000 employees at the Internal Revenue Service’s Kansas City campus are expected to learn how they will be affected by the shutdown.
“It is a bullying tactic, a fear tactic, to try to get people to react,” said Shannon Ellis, who represents IRS workers in Kansas City, referring to the memo. “That is how we’re looking at that.”
The federal government began shutting down last week after Congress failed to pass legislation to fund operations. As lawmakers and the Trump administration point fingers, the standoff is poised to leave thousands of Kansas City workers without pay.
Ellis, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, or NTEU, Chapter 66, told The Star on Tuesday that IRS workers are protected from the shutdown until Wednesday due to funding from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Starting on Wednesday, however, workers at the major Kansas City employer are poised to find out whether they will be furloughed and sent home without pay or continue working without pay.
Ellis estimated that fewer than 100 of the campus’s 5,000 employees will be considered exempt from the shutdown.
“It costs money to go to work, period,” said Ellis, pointing to gas, day care and food. “It costs a lot for an individual just to drive into work each week and not knowing how long this would last. But if these employees would not get paid, that’s devastating.”
The scary part, Ellis said, is that federal employees don’t feel like members of Congress have their best interests at heart.
“It’s the scariest part because we’re not able to trust those that vote and control every piece of our job,” she said.
There are numerous other federal agencies across the sprawling Kansas City area, including roughly 200 workers at the U.S. Department of Labor.
Jefferson Suchman, who represents those employees, estimates that about 75% of all Department of Labor workers have been furloughed due to the shutdown.
“Almost no one is getting paid, even the people who are working,” said Suchman, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 1748. “Anything that you were planning to do financially has to wait because there is no certainty at all.”
Suchman said the ongoing threats to federal workers, such as the memo about employees not being eligible for back pay, would be “a devastating hit for my people.” But he added that the law is clear that federal workers should be reimbursed after the shutdown.
“This is just another illegal action to threaten government employees, to raise the level of uncertainty for government employees and to make it miserable for us,” Suchman said. “They just want it to be a bargaining chip.”
