Only seven House members (all Republicans) showed logic, principle, and political courage on Friday by voting against a bill that will eventually provide back pay for federal workers furloughed during the partial government shutdown.
A very simple, commonsense principle should apply here: If you don’t work, you don’t get paid. Period.
It matters not if it’s not your fault that you aren’t working. If you are in the private sector and your employer decides to close shop for the last three weeks of a year because there’s a lull in business, then you won’t get paid — even if the lull in business isn’t your fault. No reasonable person would expect otherwise.
So why should federal civil servants be any different? Why should taxpayers be forced — repeat, forced, under penalty of law — to pay for services not being performed for them?
This isn’t to say that federal workers merit no sympathy. It isn’t to say their jobs aren’t valuable. It is merely to say that they shouldn’t be paid for what they haven’t earned.
As it is, federal workers enjoy excellent benefits, with (usually) good working conditions and, most importantly, almost outlandishly rigorous job guarantees. Federal civil service protections are extraordinarily strong. Firing a federal civil servant requires a complicated, extremely bureaucratic process and can be done only for what even the liberal Slate website once described as “egregious cases” such as “gross incompetence, habitual tardiness, or on-the-job beer guzzling.”
Millions of federal workers do not exploit these protections. They are conscientious, competent, and caring. But those of us who have been civil servants (not to mention most taxpayers who have ever tried to get help from bureaucrats) know full well that other millions of federal workers may go through the motions, providing decent work but at a snail’s pace. Worse, tens of thousands may do almost no work at all, secure in the knowledge that some supervisors may think firing them is more trouble than it is worth.
For that level of job security, federal workers know, going in, that the one thing that can easily affect their paychecks is a decision of the political branches not to fund them — whether by deliberately eliminating the positions entirely or by failing, as in a shutdown, to pass an appropriation for the purpose.
One friend of mine, a superb and talented federal worker, making a different (not directly pay-related) point on Facebook the other day, put the reality of government employment quite plainly: “We are pawns, and it is a risk one accepts when one accepts public service.”
Obviously, American citizens deserve a government that works. Obviously, a government shutdown leaves crucial work undone and much missed, which is a testament to the worthiness of most civil service jobs. But if those jobs are undone, why should we pay for them?
This is especially true when the government is running annual trillion-dollar deficits, on top of the highest peacetime debt levels in American history, to the point that the Federal Reserve chairman is becoming “very worried” about the debt’s effect on the whole economy. Not only are taxpayers being asked to pony up for no services in return, but their nation’s economic health is being put more at risk in the process.
So here’s a tip of the hat to the seven House members with the guts to vote the right way, against automatic back pay for unperformed work: Reps. Justin Amash, R-Mich., Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., Glen Grothman, R-Wis., Thomas Massie, R-Ky., Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Ted Yoho, R-Fla. They are the only ones in Washington putting taxpayers first.
