Trump has been out of power for over four months now, but former appointees and employees in the federal government under him are still being humiliated by him.
You may recall that Trump engaged in a politically-motivated stunt to increase his chances of being reelected by imposing a mandatory payroll tax holiday on federal workers, but the taxes they owed were never forgiven.
Former appointees are now discovering they have big bills.
One former official called her $1,300 bill “unacceptable,” saying she and her colleagues “gave our time and effort to this agency and this is how we’re getting paid back.”
Said another, asked to pay almost $1,200: “It’s just a very unfortunate situation.” [...]
But the initiative was widely rejected by private sector employers, in part because they feared workers would be unprepared to pay the money back.
It was mandatory, though, for federal employees making less than $4,000 per biweekly paycheck, and the government began implementing it in September.
To some extent this is amusing, but career employees who did not necessarily sign up for duty under Trump were also forced into this temporary tax holiday. It was not limited to just his favorites.
Trump's payroll tax holiday did not juice the economy in any significant way and such tax holidays rarely do. Moreover, Congress was never going to vote in favor of making the holiday permanent as Trump promised.
A vote to make a payroll tax holiday permanent is a vote to partially defund Medicare and Social Security. Even Republicans are reluctant to do that in most cases as they were with Trump's tax holiday. Doing so does not even improve economic conditions in any significant manner. Controlling the coronavirus pandemic would have improved economic conditions infinitely more than sending federal employees home with an extra twenty dollars. But Trump just wanted an easy way out and people are paying a literal price for it now.