Largest employer of veterans....shutdown jobs and paychecks

Stress Over Shutdown Hits Veterans Who Work For The Federal Government Hard

St. Louis PBS
Chad Davis
January 23, 2019

The federal government is the largest employer of veterans in the U.S. One-third of the federal government is made up of veterans.

Donna Rogers hasn’t received a paycheck in weeks. An Army veteran who works at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) office in St. Louis, she’s among the 800,000 federal employees around the nation working without pay or on furlough.

The lack of a paycheck is weighing on her. The partial government shutdown is now the longest running in U.S. history, with no end in sight. “Being a single mom, bills are still due, period,” Rogers said. “So whether you have kids or no kids, you have teenagers, grown folks, whatever; I mean, bills are still coming through.”

Now veterans and their advocates are worried how financial instability is affecting this group of federal workers’ mental health, especially since many veterans consider the federal government an employer of last resort.

“Being unstable financially can cause a whole lot of more issues for our veterans,” Rogers said. “Not only we came to where some of us couldn’t get jobs once we got out the military, we have to be trained because nobody was accepting the jobs we did.”
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