White House moves to shield pandemic response if the government shuts down
Source: Washington Post
The Biden administration is striving to insulate the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic from a shutdown that looms if Congress cannot agree on a plan to keep the government funded past midnight Thursday. Federal regulators would continue their review of coronavirus vaccines and treatments,while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would pursue its pandemic-related responsibilities, including tracking covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths, according to interviews and a contingency staffing plan issued by the White House’s budget office.
And while the National Institutes of Health would keep only one-fourth of its nearly 5,000 staff in their jobs, the government’s main engine of biomedical research would “continue to support priority covid-19 research and development, grants research and oversight and contracting activities,” according to an administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans. If a shutdown materializes, the official said, the administration “will take every step it legally can to mitigate the impacts … on our pandemic response.”
Nevertheless, some HHS staff, overworked and exhausted after more than a year-and-a-half of trying to contain the nation’s worse public health crisis in a century, are unhappy they might temporarily forego paychecks because lawmakers cannot agree on funding the government. “Come on, government leaders, can you guys work just as hard [as] we’re working so the government can keep functioning?” said a CDC official, speaking on condition of anonymity to share a frank assessment. “We’re trying to get our s--- together, couldn’t you get your expletive together, too?”
Taken together, the Department of Health and Human Services intends to keep 57 percent of its employees working through a shutdown, according to a contingency staffing plan for the department. That would be slightly more than the 50 percent who worked through the most recent full shutdown of the department, in early 2018. The sprawling department oversees the vast majority of the response to the pandemic, which has caused at least 43 million cases of covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, in the United States, and more than 691,000 deaths.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/pandemic-response-shutdown/2021/09/29/a9a8be24-20a8-11ec-b3d6-8cdebe60d3e2_story.html
Having been through several furloughs in the past before retiring, this is what keeps them doing them, with the threat of "not being paid" getting louder and louder the more the loons get elected in Congress on the the GOP side.
In the past, those who were furloughed (except contractors who are SOL) got paid retroactively, but that last furlough, the threat not to pass legislation to retroactively pay workers was atrocious, and many other types of workers from other industries facing furloughs themselves in their occupations, were also beating that drum.
In this case, the furloughs are self-inflicted wounds wrapped in showmanship and has nothing to do with the business of the government as the government isn't out "selling goods and services for profit", and so it's not a "private business decision" to do it.
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