"Three Weeks Doesn't Cut It," Rep. DeFazio Hears From Federal Employees

By Tiffany Eckert

Published January 25, 2019 at 5:11 PM PST

U.S. Representative Peter DeFazio in his Eugene office at the Wayne Morse Federal Courthouse. He received a congressional memo Friday saying the stop gap funding measure would only require a voice vote so he would not have to fly to D.C. tonight.

The White House announced a short-term deal to re-open the government by Friday evening. In Eugene, Oregon’s U.S. Representative Peter DeFazio met with scores of federal employees who have been working without pay for over a month. KLCC’s Tiffany Eckert reports.

The stop-gap funding measure would re-open the government through February 15 ^th. After hearing this news, 60 Federal employees including Coast Guard, Transportation Safety and Air Traffic Control told Congressman DeFazio what they thought.

“They said 3 weeks doesn’t cut it. There were people there who were supervisory level. They said, ‘we’re trying to hire people into the agency. How are we gonna hire people if 3 weeks from today they might not be getting a paycheck?’”

Defazio says many of the federal employees described financial hardships during the shutdown. He says they asked him to figure out how to keep this from happening again.

“We need to go to a two-year budget cycle and then we have to have a provision in there that says should Congress and the president not agree on a budget, operations will continue at the existing level.”

DeFazio says part of the short term deal includes talks on Homeland Security funding.