This is going to help take down any number of endangered Republican Congresscritters with significant Federal civilian worker populations in their districts. "Thanks, Trump!"
President Trump on Thursday headed off a potential substantial raise for federal workers in the event of a congressional budget deadlock, repeating his call for lawmakers to freeze the salaries of 2 million federal employees in 2019. [snip]
"...We must maintain efforts to put our Nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and Federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” Trump’s letter said. (our emphasis)"There's no money in the Treasury! We gave it all away to corporations and the wealthy in last year's tax cuts! Sad!"
As this tweet points out, the roughly 80 percent of Federal civilian workers who live outside of the Washington, DC, area are sprinkled around some important battleground states:
Approximate number of civilian govt. workers/voters in the following states will not get raises in 2019, because of @realDonaldTrump's decision today: #FL: 79K#GA: 72K#IA: 9K #KY: 23K#MICH: 26K#MO: 34K#NC: 44K#OH: 50K#PA: 60K#TX: 114K#VA: 136K#WV: 15K#WISC: 15K— West Wing Reports (@WestWingReport) August 30, 2018
(OPM)
As with those of their private sector brethren, the wages of Federal civilian workers aren't keeping up with the current inflation rate of 2.9%. Over a third of these workers are veterans; they represent a wide range of occupations from scientists to law enforcement to doctors and nurses to everything in between. We doubt they're going to be fooled by your posturing about being a fiscal hawk after the wealthfare tax giveaway you and your rotted- out party been touting all over the country.
