Workers at some overseas U.S. military bases are going without pay during the shutdown, with employees on at least one base in Germany directed to food pantries before local officials stepped in.
Active-duty military personnel across the world have continued to get paychecks during the shutdown, though the funding to pay them could dry up later this month if no agreement is reached.
But local civilians employed on overseas bases have already seen their salaries disrupted, with thousands going without pay since the longest shutdown in U.S. history began almost six weeks ago.
At the largest U.S. military base in Europe, official guidance directed local workers to food banks before German officials stepped in to cover the funding gap.
A list of support organizations on the shutdown guidance webpage for U.S. Army Garrison Bavaria included German food-sharing charity Food for All, the app “Too Good to Go,” and Tafel Deutschland, which it described as an umbrella organization that “distributes food to people in poverty through its more than 970 local food banks.” The list was removed sometime on Wednesday.
The Defense Department said that the guide was for foreign nationals employed on the base and not intended for U.S. troops or American military personnel.
A Pentagon spokesperson told NBC News on Friday that the list “was created weeks ago, when the U.S. Army was concerned that its German employees might not be getting paid” during the shutdown.
Soldiers and U.S. civilian employees “have access to several support programs on their bases,” the spokesperson added. Soldiers “did in fact get paid at the end of October,” a spokesman for U.S. Army Europe and Africa told NBC News.
The German government stepped in to pay the salaries of nearly 11,000 civilians who work on U.S. military bases, the nation’s finance ministry said in a statement. It is counting on being repaid once the shutdown ends, a spokesperson said.
While some governments have stepped in to foot the bill, others have not done so, with employees in Italy and Portugal working unpaid as the gridlock in Washington drags on.
“It’s an absurd situation because nobody has responses, nobody feels responsible,” said Angelo Zaccaria, a union coordinator at the Aviano Air Base in northeastern Italy.
“This is having dramatic effects on us Italian workers,” he told The Associated Press.
How local employees are paid varies by country and is based on specific agreements the U.S. government has with each host nation, said Amber Kelly-Herard, a public affairs spokesperson for the U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa.
During the shutdown, Kelly-Herard said, local employees were expected to continue to perform their jobs in accordance with their work contracts.
A Pentagon spokesperson said: “We value the important contributions of our local national employees around the world.”
Linda Bilmes, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and an expert on public finance, said locals working as contractors at U.S. military bases are generally most at risk of losing pay.
She added that the U.S. government in the past always paid back full-time employees — but that contractors are not always covered, which is why some add extra fees in their contracts to cover potential government funding stoppages.
“I doubt anyone anticipated this length of delay,” Bilmes said.
