Nearly 1,000 employees of the West Virginia Army and Air National Guards will have their jobs impacted if federal sequester cuts go through later this week in Congress.
President Barack Obama and congressional leaders have failed to reach a spending agreement and beginning Friday $85 billion in federal cuts will kick in.
West Virginia National Guard spokesman Lt. David Lester says 56 temporary technicians with the Guard will immediately become unemployed.
“They will be laid off,” Lester said. An additional 906 Guard workers will be shifted to four-day work weeks.
“Every week they will have to take an unpaid day off for 22 straight weeks,” Lester said. The West Virginia Air National Guard has one of the best mission capable rates in the nation. Lester says the cuts will impact that ability.
“When you begin to lose your experienced maintenance people but you still have your missions. The missions aren’t necessarily going away. It’s definitely going to have an impact,” Lester said. “We’ll mitigate it as much as we can but it think that it won’t is crazy.”
A hiring freeze is also anticipated.
“It’s not right to not allow people to come to work and then begin to hire people,” Lester said. “So when we begin to lose people to attrition, it’s going to be very hard to hire somebody else.”
The National Guard has about 2,500 employees across the state.
The news is better if the state has a natural disaster. State funds pay for Guard members to respond to those situations.
