42,000 US Coast Guard Personnel Working Without Pay During Shutdown

Posted on by December 29, 2018

Approximately 42,000 active-duty military members of the Coast Guard remain on duty during the partial government shutdown that began Saturday, but they will work without pay until further notice, according to a statement from a Coast Guard spokeswoman.

“Unless legislation is passed by Friday, Dec. 28, our military workforce will not receive our regularly scheduled pay check for 31 Dec.,” Chief Warrant Officer Allyson Conroy said in a statement to NBC News on Wednesday.

The Coast Guard is the only part of the military under the Department of Homeland Security, rather than the Department of Defense which continues to be funded during the shutdown.

NBC News reports that of the thousands of people in the Coast Guard’s civilian workforce, most have been furloughed without pay until further notice, with a small fraction still working as essential personnel.

Emily Garris, 42, the wife of a Coast Guard member stationed in California and mother of two, told NBC News the current shutdown has left many families feeling “cast aside.”

In previous government shutdowns when the other military branches were also affected, Garris said her husband was paid as a result of emergency funding passed by Congress.

This is the first time in her husband’s 25 years of service he has come so close to not receiving a paycheck, she said in a phone interview Wednesday.

“People who serve in the Coast Guard don’t do it for the riches. They do it because they love our country; they want to serve the country they love,” Garris said. “And for us to just be cast aside, this is hurtful. We put so much on the line every day.”

Comments

42,000 US Coast Guard Personnel Working Without Pay During Shutdown — 9 Comments

  1. One of those rare situations where it’s truly impossible to keep politics out of the wardroom because it’s oozing in like a toxic gas.

    2+2=4 vs 2+2=5 does not average out to a correct answer of 4.5. There is no “center” to this matter. Let alone all the other debatable points of “the wall,” the $5 billion ransom fee for paying these people and so many others would cover but a tiny fraction of the cost of a wall as described by Agent Orange during his campaign, the wall that we were told we would not be paying for. To finish the job would require extended tiresome and stupid repetitions of the current fiasco. There’s no functional compromise in this situation that does not laugh in the face of reality.

    This hostage incident is purely theatrical gratification of some weird kind for the ignoramus squatting in the WH, a histrionic tantrum of historical proportions. Most of us knew better, thankfully and as a small ray of hope for improvement.

  2. Looking at this from the outside, IF the wall is built the Coastguard are going to be the ones fishing all the migrants trying to get around the ends out of the sea: therefore it would be folly to upset them now with short change.
    In the UK we also have a problem, unless the illegal migrants crossing the Dover straits in small inflatable boats are already in distress the French authorities just watch them until they are in UK waters before they fish them out and hand them over to the UK border guards for processing.

  3. Congress supposedly passed a bill 7 days ago that federal employees are to get back pay that is currently being with held because of the “fool on the hill”

  4. Noon news said no pay, which we already know, but what about the retirees and those on USCG disability and pension?

    Willy, that fool on the hill is loved by people with lots of stock to worry about, plus more jobs than there has been in years.

  7. Despite the lies told by Trump, illegal immigration is at a 50 year low. And regardless a wall would nothing to address the problem. Most undocumented immigrants enter this country legally and overstay their visas.

    Coast Guardsmen do not deserve to be screwed over because a clown in the Oval Office can’t get his vanity project funded.