With the last agency expecting furloughs now having started them, the furlough situation, which has been a moving target at many agencies for months, seems largely settled for the remainder of the current fiscal year. DoD, where some 650,000 employees are now taking on average one day a week of furloughs for a total of 11 days, removed one of the few remaining hopes of minimizing furloughs there by saying it was both authorized and required by law to impose furloughs on employees whose salaries are funded by multi-year "working capital" funds; a number of members of Congress had challenged including those employees in furloughs. A bill to cancel the DoD furloughs has been offered in the House but even should the longshot bill pass, DoD has said it has reached the limits of the savings it can achieve without furloughs, and the bill would create no new funding authority to achieve the sequestration cost savings. Meanwhile the IRS has canceled one of its two remaining scheduled furlough/closing days, for Monday (July 22), although so far making no decision regarding the other, set for August 30. Until that announcement it had left open the prospect of adding one or two days beyond those two. And the EEOC, which had raised the possibility of adding three more days, has said it will need no more than the five days employees already have taken.
