As the shutdown of the U.S. federal government entered its second week, Donald Trump threatened to block furloughed federal workers from receiving back pay once the government shutdown is over. This comes on top of earlier Trump threats to enact mass firings of federal workers if Senate Democrats continue to block Republican efforts to pass a temporary funding measure to reopen the government.
Senate Democrats have refused to vote for legislation to reopen the government unless it includes a commitment to extend expiring Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies, which if not addressed will increase monthly premiums for more than 22 million ACA enrollees by 75 percent to 114 percent. It’s estimated if rates rise, some 2 million to 4 million Americans will lose their health insurance altogether.
Danny Tsoi, a federal worker at the Department of Health and Human Services, is one of 620,000 government employees who’ve been placed on furlough since the shutdown began on Oct. 1. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Tsoi, who works at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in New York and is a member of the American Federation of Government Employees union, about what’s at stake in negotiations to end the shutdown for workers like him and essential government programs that serve the needs of millions of Americans.
DANNY TSOI: I think the threats of not providing back pay that was in law in 2019 as during the previous two administrations ago, and the idea that the staff reductions that are proposed during the shutdown, something that can be passed and is legal is a very troubling idea for a lot of federal workers such as myself. And I think personally that all these different headline items are scare tactics to one, cause federal workers to be less willing to speak out. For example, two whistleblowers from the Housing and Urban Development were fired a few weeks ago based off of their whistle-blowing of sharing how the Fair Housing Act was not properly being supported because of staff reductions. And you could look at that report, Federal Unionists Network put something out regarding that. There’s a lot of different ways in which we have seen, as federal workers, re tactics that are employed to make us afraid to be willing to speak out.
And that just shows that what we say has credence, right? And showing that the simple story that the healthcare is provided to illegal immigrants is a very catchy headline. But the truth of the matter is that ACA, the Affordable Care Act, does not cover folks that are non-citizens.
However, there is some truth in that people, no matter what their citizenship status, do receive emergency care in hospitals, as part of EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act), and hospitals are required—if they want to participate in a Medicare program for CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services)—they’re required to provide emergency services no matter who shows up. And I think that is a sign of the American spirit and how we think about compassionate healthcare and how I think if anyone is talking about healthcare and talking about providing Make America Healthy, we need to think about how emergency care works.
And essentially, you don’t want to say that we’re “closed doors” to someone that doesn’t look like someone else or for any other reason. So I think that is the more complex and important topic regarding how healthcare is. But essentially, a lot of what was said prior is not true, but there is some truth to the importance of how healthcare is delivered in this country.
SCOTT HARRIS: I wanted to ask you, Danny, what do you think the Trump regime’s long-term goal here is in these severe cuts to all kinds of federal programs, their budgets, their staff, eliminating entire agencies without the consent of Congress and the Supreme Court has apparently let that go—this extremist wing of the Supreme Court majority. What do you think their end goal is here and what are your worries about our country in terms of the services that you provide at Health and Human Services and the countless other agencies that are really being hampered in terms of their ability to provide services?
So there’s a wholesale targeted approach across many different benefits that many people benefit from. And because of that, I feel that many Americans and also folks across the country are going to feel the impacts more so. Some it will take longer, some happen to be administrative changes, like say work requirements and things like that— that will affect people in a way that is not directly impacting them, but creates administrative hurdles.
So people have tougher time accessing the benefits. And in the sense some of the impacts may be invisible. Some of them may be more visible like Head Start and things like that. So I think the way in which government is being shrunk, it’s not really for efficiency. This is really trying to provide less services. And these are things that Congress—remember many years ago agreed in a bipartisan manner to do these type of programs. So this is stepping back from the congressional promise of what they’re trying to provide to American people. And I think that’s a really important thing to remember, is that this is not really a partisan issue. This is something that government made a promise to the people that elected them there to do certain things. And right now we have a shutdown because those things are not happening and we’re trying to figure that out.
For more information, visit the Federal Unionist Network at federalunionists.net.
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