Trump's chief economic adviser to federal workers: Get a loan
With no end in sight to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, many federal workers forced to work without pay are scrambling to find other ways of making ends meet.
Kevin Hassett, President Donald Trump's chief economic adviser, can attest to that. In an interview Tuesday on Fox Business Network's After the Bell, the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers noted that one agency employee had told him she'd taken on a second job to pay the bills -- driving for Uber.
The shutdown is causing "a lot of pain," he acknowledged.
It doesn't take a PhD economist like Hassett to recognize that. After missing their first paycheck last week, thousands of government workers across the U.S., including members of the Coast Guard, have flooded local food pantries. TSA staff, who are among the hundreds of thousands of government employees working unpaid, are calling in sick to find other jobs -- the kind that offer a paycheck. Furloughed parents are cinching their belts to afford insulin.
Cheryl Inzunza Blum, a federal immigration lawyer in Arizona, is trying to ease the pain by renting out a room in her home on Airbnb.
"I have a young man who's visiting town to do some biking, and he's going to come tomorrow and stay a week," she told The Associated Press. "I'm thrilled because that means immediate money. Once they check in, the next day there's some money in my account."
Hassett, an expert on public finance, has another piece of advice for government workers trying to get by, suggesting on Fox Business that people "should contact their supervisors in order to help them with the federal credit unions making low-interest loans and so on."