Federal Employee Retroactive Pay Fairness Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. TERRY. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentlemen from Virginia, Messrs. Moran and Wolf, for their effort, but also for personally coming up to me and asking me to be an early advocate of this very important bill.

Like them, I have many constituents who are Federal employees who are furloughed right now, including most of the majority of them being civilian employees at Offutt Air Force Base and STRATCOM. The legislation that we are considering here today will ensure that the 800,000 Federal employees are paid for the time lost or off work during this impasse.

Now, we worked last week in a bipartisan effort to make sure that our military would be paid, and included in that bill called Pay Our Military Act was also very clear language that protected civilian DOD workers who are furloughed. But, unfortunately, in a bizarre ``what's the definition of `is' discussion'' in the White House and DOD, they furloughed 60-70 percent of the civilian employees where there are critical missions, endangering our country.

So having a bill like this where we come together in a bipartisan way, we can reduce some level of frustration, we can give some level of peace of mind to those employees that they will be reimbursed for their time lost, they will get paid. I want the DOD today to put those civilian DOD employees back to work as it's clearly in the law.

Now, there is historical precedent for this, all of the way back to Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill and their six closedowns when employees were paid and reimbursed for their time off, and so it should be for this effort. This is bipartisan. The President has said he will sign this. I urge my colleagues to support this effort.

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