Last Friday, Trump Canceled 2019 Pay Raises for 2,000,000 Federal Employees

Over the past two years, Trump and Republicans have pushed through a massively unpopular tax cut that drastically lowered taxes on the wealthiest people and corporations.  This caused a massive budget deficit. 

Their solutions to the unfathomable loss of revenue to fund our government is save money by hurting the lower and middle class any way they can.  In this case, Trump has canceled the 2019 pay raise for federal employees.  

Trump issued an executive order on Friday freezing pay for federal civilian workers in 2019, even as about 800,000 of them were either furloughed or working without pay because of a partial government shutdown.

The executive order affects the pay of roughly two million civilian workers.   

...leaders nonetheless condemned Mr. Trump’s action as an unnecessary provocation.  “There is no economic or budgetary justification for the president’s freeze, and lawmakers agree that federal pay must rise not only as a matter of decency, but also in order to help agencies attract and retain the federal work force that America deserves,” J. David Cox, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement.

So disgusting and unacceptable.  How do Republicans win any elections?  Baffling.

....pay for government employees would have automatically increased by roughly 2 percent in January.... The Senate passed a 1.9 percent increase, but the [Republican] House never followed suit, opening the door for Trump to act unilaterally on his proposed freeze.

“Our federal work force protects our nation, ensures the safety of our food and medicine, delivers Social Security and veterans’ benefits, and carries out countless other responsibilities on behalf of our citizens,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, said in a statement while proposing to add the increase to a short-term funding bill earlier this month.

Trump, his handlers, and Republicans would like nothing more than to destroy our federal government.  

 

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/29/business/trump-federal-pay-freeze.html 

Date: 
Wednesday, January 2, 2019