The impact of Trump’s shutdown continues to unfold.
Just in: The FBI Agents Association has sent a petition to the White House and Congress, signed by representatives of field offices across the country, warning of the effect of the continued government shutdown on agents and their work. pic.twitter.com/5EgZdkF6DD
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) January 10, 2019
Here are the key points in more readable form.
1. FBI Special Agents are subject to high security standards that include rigorous and routine financial background checks to ensure that agents are routinely financially stable and responsible. Missing payments on debts could create delays in securing or renewing security clearances and could even disqualify agents from continuing to serve in some cases.
2. The operations of the FBI require funding. As the shutdown continues, Special Agents remain at work for the American people without being paid, and FBI leadership is doing all it can to fund FBI operations with increasingly limited resources — this situation is not sustainable. The important work done by the bureau needs to be funded immediately.
3. Pay uncertainly undermines the FBI’s ability to recruit and maintain high caliber professionals. Special Agents are skilled professionals who have a variety of employment options in the private sector. The ongoing financial insecurity caused by a failure to fund the FBI could lead some FBI Special Agents to consider career options that provide more stability for their families.
These people are not getting a check tomorrow and so they petition Trump and “our elected representatives to fund the Department of Justice (‘DOJ’) and the FBI because financial security is a matter of national security.”
This travesty of a shutdown is grinding the efficiency of normal government functions to a halt. This is only going to get worse. As Snoop Dogg observed a few days ago, “He don’t give a f*ck about us.” That’s as simple as it gets. The government has been taken over by a clown imposter trying to play the role of “leader” and “big shot” because his outsized ego drives him to get attention in increasingly grandiose terms. The Republican party are complicit enablers to this fiasco. In tandem, Trump and the GOP are like termites, gnawing away at the foundation of our republic.
We need to get as many of them as possible out of office because the advent of Trump has taken politics way beyond partisan considerations. Trump and the GOP are a cancer in the body politic. We need to excise them out so that we can survive.
