Federal Employee Retroactive Pay Fairness Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. TURNER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The House remains actively engaged in finding a solution to end the current impasse. The House has passed a number of commonsense bills to fund our troops, continue funding for veterans' benefits, and allow the District of Columbia to spend its own funds. The House has also passed legislation to bring defense civilian employees back to work. Unfortunately, the administration appears to be purposefully refusing to use the authority granted by the Pay Our Military Act, meaning roughly 400,000 defense civilian employees remain at home, unable to work.

While we wait on the President and Senate to reach across the aisle, it is important to provide needed certainty to Federal employees who have been furloughed without pay. Each and every one of us has Federal employees in our district, most of whom are guided by a sense of civic duty and take pride in helping make their country a better place.

Civilian defense personnel at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, doctors and nurses at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, records management professionals at the National Archives, and countless other dedicated men and women throughout my community are employed by Federal agencies and have been subject to furlough.

In the gulf coast region and other disaster-prone areas, NOAA employees help prepare for and monitor major storms. In the aftermath of these natural disasters, FEMA workers are sent into horrible and hazardous conditions to help restore broken communities.

At NASA, employees help us, figuratively and literally, to reach for the stars. They encourage future generations to not be bound by seemingly physical and intellectual barriers.

Our law enforcement agencies work tirelessly to investigate and capture those who seek to do harm to the homeland as well as our allies abroad. The list goes on.

H.R. 3223 ensures the Federal civilian workers will receive retroactive pay for the duration of the Federal Government shutdown regardless of their furlough status. Federal workers who have been furloughed under a shutdown have historically received their pay retroactively. H.R. 3223 provides today's workforce a guarantee that their pay will resume once the President and Senate Democrats agree to meaningful discussions that will ultimately resolve this impasse.

I urge support for this bill as we continue to work on legislation to reopen critical operations of the Federal Government, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. TURNER. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, the other side of the aisle would have us believe that this shutdown is somehow a Republican-engineered shutdown. They would have you believe that the government only shuts down with Republican leadership, and we know that that's not the case.

The government shuts down when there's a failure of the democratic process to work and parties to negotiate in good faith and the deliberative process of democracy to move forward. The President has absolutely shut that down with his refusal to negotiate.

We had a government shutdown when Mr. Reagan was in the White House. Under President Reagan, the Democrat-controlled Congress shut the government down a total of eight times, for 14 days. So a Democrat-controlled Congress actually shut the government down under Reagan for longer than it has been shut down now. Again, under Mr. Clinton, the House also shut the government down.

In each of those instances, there was something different than what's now--and that is that there were negotiations going on. President Reagan was negotiating with the House and Senate. President Clinton was negotiating with the House and Senate. But this President said absolutely no negotiations.

This President will negotiate with Syria. He'll negotiate with Iran. He'll even have secret negotiations with Russia and secret deals. But he will not negotiate with the legislature.

Now, what won't he negotiate over?

He won't negotiate over the debt limit. He wants to take the country from $17 trillion to $19 trillion in debt. No negotiations.

He won't negotiate on his sequestration. In my community, there were 12,000 people that were furloughed. The President will not negotiate on his sequester.

The President will not negotiate on funding the government. We have sent countless bills over to the Senate that would reopen the national parks, that would fund the veterans, that would allow Washington, D.C., to spend its own funds, and Harry Reid heartlessly has said in response to these bills that would provide needed services, Why would we do that?

But we know that the President is playing politics because this House and the Senate passed the Pay Our Military Act. It was signed by the President of the United States. I have sent letters to Secretary Hagel and to the President questioning why he would have furloughed 400,000 DOD workers when he had signed the Pay Our Military Act, and 8,700 workers in my community were furloughed.

How do we know they were playing politics by letting the Department of Defense employees go even though the President had full authority to fund them? Because he's going to be calling them back. He's calling them back without any other passage of any other law or any other law that he signs. So clearly, the President is admitting that he's been playing politics with these furloughs--and it needs to stop.

It also needs to stop so our Federal workers do not have to worry about their pay, they do not have to worry about the impacts on their personal lives. They have child care expenses, house payments to make, kids that are in college. And while the President refuses to negotiate, while he's playing politics, they shouldn't worry about whether or not they can make ends meet.

I encourage my colleagues to support H.R. 3223 that would restore the pay to Federal workers and ensure that they have the security that they need.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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