THE FEDERAL BUDGET : Employees Face Getting Paid to Do Little

A blond, bearded man walked in no particular hurry though the L’Enfant Plaza Metro subway station in Washington on Friday afternoon looking baffled. He was thinking about the prospect of returning to his federal job Monday for the first time in three weeks.

Just when he thought the government shutdown couldn’t get any weirder, it had. The latest plan passed by the Republican-dominated Congress is expected to send him back to his desk at the International Trade Commission with pay but with no operating budget.

If he calls Singapore, who will pay the phone bill? Can he get on the Internet and chat with Europe? Will the office be heated?

“I have no idea how this is going to work,” the man said, bewildered. “Until we have a budget, we can’t start anything because we don’t know who will be there to finish it. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Pity the poor federal troops. First the government tells them they can’t work. Then the government orders them to work without pay. Now the government wants to pay them not to work.

Translation: If the congressional plan is signed into law by the president, as expected, 780,000 federal employees will report to their offices Monday morning essentially to sit on their hands. A few agencies had temporary operating funds restored, but most workers will not have the money to carry out their duties.

So confusing are the terms of this latest shutdown solution that some agencies are consulting lawyers to find out if it’s OK to buy fax paper.

“People are going to get into disputes about what they can and can’t do,” one Justice Department manager predicted. “It’s going to create chaos.”

Here is a sampling of what confused federal workers envisioned for Monday:

* Technicians will return to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Ann Arbor, Mich., lab to continue certification of a new Ford truck but probably will not have the money to plug into the databank that holds background information.

* Eleven thousand Forest Service firefighters will be raring to go, but with no money to prevent fires.

* Staff members at the Department of Housing and Urban Development will report bright and early to confront a backlog of 30,000 mortgage insurance applications and not have a dime to process even one of them.

“A lot of people are saying, what does Congress have against people doing their jobs?” said Jim Petterson, spokesman for the Department of Agriculture. “If you want to attract the best and the brightest to public service, you’ve got to treat people a hell of a lot better than Congress is treating them.”

Even this latest solution offers no guaranteed end to the misery; the deal only extends to Jan. 26. But this beleaguered, demoralized, cash-strapped federal work force will take it.

“Anything they do to send us back to work is a good thing,” one woman said, standing in a biting wind outside a Department of Housing and Urban Development building that was quiet as a church. “For us, this has been horrible. There is no other word for it. It’s like working for a bunch of children playing games.”

For weeks now, parts of the government have been limping along like the old Soviet Union on a bad day, and the latest stop-gap measure will hardly change that.

When a fax machine at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases ran out of paper recently, Dr. John La Montagne, director of the division that studies important vaccines, had to run to Kinko’s to get some. “I ended up buying three different sizes because I didn’t know what size we used,” he said. “I spent $40.”

But his agency is one of the lucky ones. When members of his staff show up on Monday, they will be at one of the agencies that was granted operating funds by Congress Friday night. They’ll have the know-how to buy the right paper and the money to do it.

Staff writers Jim Bornemeier, Marlene Cimons, Ronald J. Ostrow and David G. Savage contributed to this story.