‘Incredible pay’ and ‘easy hours’: Kansas senator has a skewed view of federal workers | Opinion

There have been times, it’s true, when Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall’s befuddlement has made us smile. That time he praised Kansas City’s statue of Winston and Clementine Churchill as a wonderful tribute to Ewing and Muriel Kauffman, for example, no one suffered as the result of his trademark confusion.

But Marshall’s complete lack of understanding about who federal civil servants are, and what they do for the rest of us, is not so benign.

According to him, they make big bucks for almost no work, and so should be as blasé as he is about the upcoming GOP shutdown.

“I think when you take a job with the federal government, you realize that there’s pros and cons and this is one of the cons of it, that every five or 10 years, there’s a government shutdown,” Marshall told The Star on Thursday. “They have incredible pay, they have easy hours, only a fourth of them are actually back working in the office right now. So we all have to, you know, sacrifice.” Not all; Congress will still be paid.

That many of these dedicated public servants could make far more money in the private sector seems not to have occurred to “Doc,” as he wanted to be called on the ballot when he ran for the Senate.

Nor has the fact that these are middle-class families with mortgages and medical bills. Or the fact that a shutdown isn’t a natural disaster, but a self-destructive act, both pointless and painful.

Among those who won’t be paid but will still have to work are active duty military.

Federal firefighters for the U.S. Forest Service will still have to show up and risk their lives, too — as they do more or less constantly, amid the climate crisis that Marshall sees as exaggerated by “climate demagogues.”

Because Farm Service Agency offices will close, farmers won’t be able to get any new marketing loans.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pointed out on CNN that “shutting down the government is a choice. And it’s a choice that would make the crisis at our southern border even worse,” with all asylum hearings canceled.

Even IRS workers would be furloughed, which sounds great unless you think the country needs tax revenues to pay its bills.

The last time Republicans decided to shut down the government, for a record 35 days, it was because Mark Meadows had pushed Donald Trump to hold the government hostage over border wall funding.

It didn’t work, but while it went on, many of the 800,000 federal employees who were either furloughed or forced to work without pay missed two paychecks and had to take out short-term loans to make it through to the end of the shutdown, when they finally received back pay.

The entire economy suffered, some food safety inspections and trash pickup in national parks were put on hold, and flights were delayed because of staffing shortages.

Why is this happening again? Because the same far-right House Republicans who were all for Trump’s deficit-exploding tax cuts for the richest Americans now want to cut spending on housing assistance, nutrition assistance to poor women with young kids, low-income schools and more. They’re also proposing cuts to such luxuries as railroad safety inspections.

They are blocking even a stopgap agreement that would keep the government running for another month.

And the only possible result is economic pain with no purpose, since the Senate won’t pass the deep cuts.

One perverse plus, though, is that they then will get to complain about the economic problems they created.

Marshall and Missouri Sens. Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt all voted against the temporary funding measure, while sane Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran voted for it.

“I think my position is clear about the efforts we ought to make to reduce spending to better balance our books,” Moran told The Star. “But a shutdown does not accomplish that,” and instead, he said, only makes important services more difficult and expensive to get.

The junior senator from Kansas could learn a lot from him, but won’t.