Photograph Courtesy of New York Public Library Collection.
The secretary of the treasury has forced a fraction of the Internal Revenue Service employees, who had been laid off, to return to work and process papers for the mortgage industry.
So as not to actually break the law in plain sight, the Federal Government is paying these people with so-called "user fees," i.e., donations paid by the mortgage industry to do the work.
This was arranged by the Mortgage Bankers Association. The MBA worked with the treasury department by asking the current Federal Government to recall the Federal employees to process the papers which the MBA needed to process mortgage money, er, mortgage applications.
The head of the Mortgage Bankers Association and de facto treasury secretary honestly declared that "I'd like to take some credit. Our direct request got rapid results." Quoted in Lisa Rein and Jeff Stein, "Could You Make These Guys Essential?": Mortgage Industry Gets Shutdown Relief After Appeal to Senior Treasury Officials, Washington Post Online, Friday, January 11, 2019.
This is no surprise. The current occupier of the title of Secretary of the Treasury made much of his money from mortgages and foreclosures before entering the current Administration.
Reportedly, some observers of these arrangements question how it is legal to use Federal employees to benefit not the American public but one discrete group of private businesses. Other observers despair that no-one who has standing to object, will object and therefore they see no remedy to the situation.
Well, let's take a look at that.
The situation as you might call it is bad faith. A few people are forced to give up their labor, because through no fault of their own they are employed by the Federal Government during the current Administration, which calls them back to work in order to help a few businesses continue to make money (and prolong the shutdown because the shutdown will not feel so bad, obviously). These IRS employees are being instructed to serve the interests of a few in the name of public service.
This is happening while other people are told not to come back to work and in some cases they will not be paid. Ever.
Is a mandatory injunction available? Would their unions have standing to represent thousands of what we are told is the current laid off Federal workforce of 800,000 people? (A figure that will soon grow even higher.) The idea of a mandatory injunction might be that the rest of the hundreds of thousands of Federal workers who are not getting paid and who have also been told not to report for work, should also be brought back to work and paid.
If arrangements are made by the Federal Government that benefit some furloughed Federal workers but not others who are in the same boat, shouldn't the Federal Government lawfully be required to also arrange for these other people to be recalled back to work by the same Federal Government that told them not to come to work in the first place? And arrange to pay them also?
That brings in another idea. The Federal Government of all people is supposed to provide equal protection of the laws. Equal protection clearly demands that people be treated equally. Federal workers are people and as such, they too deserve to be treated equally.
Regardless of whether their work does or does not make money for private interests.
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