Fedweek

The current partial shutdown of the US federal government, now the longest in US history, has many federal employees including Secret Service agents and officers working unpaid, with agencies such as the IRS and USDA beginning to call more employees back to work with new designations. Image: TJ Brown/Shutterstock.com

In the latest of a series of attempts to end the partial government shutdown, the House is moving this week to pass temporary funding extensions, one through February 1 and the other through February 28, to reopen shuttered agencies.

However, there has been no change in the underlying positions over funding for a southern border wall that prevented previous House-passed measures from advancing farther. The Senate Republican leadership has refused to take them up on grounds that President Trump would not sign them.

The first attempt would have fully funded all agencies for the rest of the fiscal year except for DHS, which would have been funded only through February 8.

The second involved passing the stalled appropriations bills separately. The House has now done that for six of the seven remaining, excepting the DHS bill. One of those is the financial services agencies-general government measure that contains a 1.9 percent 2019 raise for federal employees to be paid retroactively. That provision also was in the earlier wide-ranging bill.