Federal Employee Retroactive Pay Fairness Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. LYNCH. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
I also want to thank Mr. Moran for his leadership and Mr. Wolf, as the lead sponsor of this bill, along with Mr. Cummings, Mr. Connolly, Mr. Turner, Mr. Rogers, and Mr. Wittman. I know there are a lot of staff as well who have been working hard on this bill.
Mr. Speaker, as ranking member of the Federal Workforce Subcommittee, I rise in strong support of H.R. 3223, the Federal Employee Retroactive Pay Fairness Act. This bipartisan legislation will ensure that our more than 800,000 Federal workers who have been placed on furlough since October 1 will receive full backpay for the duration of the government shutdown. This legislation recognizes that our middle-income Federal employees are totally committed to serving the American people. And to their great credit, our public servants have remained ready, willing, and able to perform their duties, even in the face of mandatory increases in their retirement costs, sequestration, related furloughs, and as they face the likelihood of their fourth consecutive year of pay freeze imposed by this Congress.
Given that these furloughed employees have already carried a major part of the burden working towards deficit reduction, it would be unjust to expect them to bear the additional cost and uncertainty of a shutdown engineered by one extreme faction within the Republican Party--not all, but one extreme faction within that group--who are intent on destroying government operations for the sake of political brinkmanship.
I would also note that these furloughed Federal employees, nevertheless, perform mission-critical agency functions. Among the employees who have been sent home by the shutdown are Federal aviation safety monitors, Department of Defense military technicians, disease surveillance personnel at the Centers for Disease Control, and also food safety inspectors at the FDA, as well as NIH researchers who are engaged in experimental clinical trials that are life-and-death matters for some.
So it's, therefore, imperative that we also pass a clean continuing resolution so that these Federal workers can immediately return to their post.
Again, I thank Mr. Moran, Mr. Wolf, and Mr. Cummings for their great work on this important legislation and urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support H.R. 3223.
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