Pentagon Says U.S. Troops Won't Get Paid During Potential Government Shutdown—but Ukraine Will
According to National Security Spokesman John Kirby, American servicemembers, including reservists on active duty, will not be paid during the looming potential government shutdown. American military and financial assistance to Ukraine, however, will continue uninterrupted.
House Republicans are attempting to pass provisions that would ensure all troops and civilian contractors on military bases that staff commissaries and the post exchanges would also be covered.
Service members will continue to report for duty, though they will not get paid during a shutdown. And many of the hundreds of thousands of civilians who work for the Department of Defense will likely be furloughed, says White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby.
Separately, the Department of Defense says post and base services would be closed or limited, while elective surgeries and procedures in its medical and dental facilities would have to be postponed. Commissaries would remain open overseas but close in the U.S.
And certain Pentagon activities, like operational planning and military recruitment, will be paused.
Obviously, the effect a shutdown would have on the military and its ability to function would be a very bad thing. There is one thing you just do not do, which is mess with our troops' pay or their services. But the most insulting part of this situation is the fact that President Biden and the Pentagon value the Ukrainian people and military over our own.
But if lawmakers fail to reach an agreement and government appropriations lapse, DOD has decided to continue activities supporting Ukraine, DOD spokesperson Chris Sherwood told POLITICO Thursday — just hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley and other senior leaders at the Pentagon.
“Operation Atlantic Resolve is an excepted activity under a government lapse in appropriations,” Sherwood said, referring to the named operation for DOD’s activities in response to the Russian invasion.
The move means that the U.S. military’s activities related to the war, such as training of Ukrainian soldiers on American tactics and equipment, as well as shipments of weapons to Kyiv, will continue despite any potential shutdown.
It is one thing to point out that America actually could survive without massive tendrils of government infiltrating their lives. But it adds insult to injury to say that funding another country's military over your own is necessary for the "common good." On one hand, Biden and the Pentagon are saying we must pass the spending bill so we can keep paying our military, but on the other, they're saying, don't worry, Ukraine's military will get their funding and supplies no matter what. If you can recall, it was then-former California Governor Ronald Reagan who told Johnny Carson in 1975 how little the government is really needed by the American people:
"We put provisions not just for active duty, it’s also for [Department of Defense] civilians and contractors, and for Coast Guard, so that they would get a paycheck no matter what happened," Rep. Jen Kiggans, R-Va., a Navy veteran who is leading the measure in the House, told Fox News Digital in an interview on Wednesday.
"Obviously, we want to not shut the government down and that is something that we are still working hard late into the night to get done," Kiggans said. "But God forbid that doesn't happen, we need to have… that reassurance for people, a group of people that I care very passionately about and that the country needs to be prioritizing, and that's our military."
Now the ball is in the Democrats' court as they decide who is more important to them; our troops or somebody else's. But the bigger issue here is that we as a nation have become so dysfunctional that every year or so it seems we are faced with a spending bill crisis that threatens to shut down the government. The US Government has only shut down 10 times in our history, most recently in 2013, 2018, and 2019. In fact, Congress has only passed all their spending bills according to their rules just four times in almost 50 years, and it has been 20 years since Congress passed a budget on time.
I don't know about you, but I do not have high hopes for the future if every damn year we are brought to our knees by the two parties that can never agree on anything anymore. The question that I hear most now, having been a political operator for some years, is, "Is this the best we can do?" We elect people to represent us and soon enough, an overwhelming majority of them get corrupted by the political establishment, or they just become completely worthless and never do their jobs.
Time to wake up America—we need your help, desperately.
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