US coast guards in Bahrain feel the pinch of shutdown

Hundreds of US Coast Guards deployed here are officially working without paychecks due to a US government shutdown, Stars and Stripes report. Fortunately for Coast Guard members in Bahrain, they live in government-leased housing off base, meaning they won’t have to worry about impatient landlords. Despite attempts in Washington to push the money through, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Karl Schultz confirmed Tuesday in a statement that the mid-January paychecks were not coming, saying it marked the first time he was aware of when servicemembers in one of the armed forces branches haven’t been paid during a shutdown.

Four weeks into the showdown, there are still no signs of a breakthrough in the faceoff between President Donald Trump and Democrats in Congress, which led to the partial shutdown of the government on December 22. More than 800,000 federal workers didn’t get paid last week, pain shared by several million more contractors who also have been idled by the shutdown -- many of them low-paid service workers who live paycheck to paycheck. The Coast Guard’s Patrol Forces Southwest Asia is permanently posted in the Gulf at the request of US Naval Forces Central Command.

“The US Coast Guard has been proactively communicating the impacts of the lapse in appropriations across the service,” the report quoted Gregg as saying. The report also points out that the coast guard, while operating tactically under the Navy, still falls under the Department of Homeland Security. Coast guard members here are among the 42,000 of the service’s officers and enlisted personnel. Across the Coast Guard, support resources available to service-members include financial counselling, loans, information and aid from other military support organisations.

This week, the service’s commandant announced that the USAA insurance and financial services company had donated $15 million, which officials said would be used to fund interest-free loans for about two week’s worth of bills. “There are many resources available to their dependents back home,” said Senior Chief Ryan Doss, a spokesperson for Coast Guard Atlantic Area, the Bahrain team’s parent command. “By engaging with our deployed members here ... we hope to minimise the personal impacts [of the shutdown] on our crews and their families.”