WASHINGTON — In an exclusive interview with The Daily Iowan, U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, gave her thoughts on the now two-week shutdown of the federal government and its impacts on federal employees, who could be facing layoffs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Daily Iowan: The White House has signaled the possibility of not giving furloughed employees back pay. Do you support that decision?

Ernst: No, and I would say that because there is already an agreement. These are men and women who work for the federal government. But what I would say, though, is that if there are nonessential employees out there, this is a time that the president and his team have available to them to go ahead and do a reduction in forces. That I could support, as long as they are eliminating those nonessential government workers. 

As far as back pay, they’re not working other jobs, so I would support back pay for them. But again, reductions in force, that’s a totally different issue.

Would you support a resolution to prohibit not providing back pay?

I want to make sure they have back pay, so if there was a resolution that came up that said we’re not going to pay the furloughed workers, I would not be supportive of that.

Some federal workers have gone without pay since Oct. 1. What’s your reaction to those workers having to go without a paycheck for two weeks now?

It’s really hard. And I would say that all of my staff here are included in that. The entire Iowa delegation has chosen not to take our paychecks as well. It’s really unfair that Congress gets paid and the furloughed workers don’t. Every senator and congressman will make that choice, but the entire Iowa delegation said, “We will defer our paychecks until everybody else is paid as well.” 

My daughter is also in the military — both she and my son-in-law serve — and they are going without paychecks, so the president determined that he would go ahead and allow for the troops to get paid. They had to juggle some funds around, but at least we saw military men and women get their paychecks. 

But that’s just a short-term fix, so we need to move through this as quickly as possible and make sure we get the back pay to our staff members, and then also make sure we’re funding the government.

What’s your message to your constituents who are federal employees who are navigating this?

We understand that this is very, very difficult, which is why every single time it’s come up, I have voted to support the clean resolution. What I want constituents back home to understand is that what we’re voting on with this clean resolution is the Joe Biden budget. It’s the Democrats’ numbers. 

That’s what we’re supporting, and what we’re also continuing to support is the Democrats’ decision to sunset the expanded COVID [Affordable Care Act] subsidies — it was actually the Democrat plan to end them this year. So what I’m supporting it’s a Democratic plan. What has caught us off guard is that the Democrats won’t support their own plan.

How do you feel about Democrats blaming Republicans for the shutdown?

Shame on them. This is their plan we are voting on. It was Democrats who passed the expanded subsidies for COVID-19, and that was during COVID-19, so what we have is a situation now, with the expanded subsidies that they want to make permanent, is we have middle-class workers who are working to pay and subsidize upper-middle-class people. That’s not the way Obamacare was intended to work. The system is broken. 

But again, it was their plan to sunset the expanded COVID-19 subsidies. That’s the plan that we are supporting, is the Democrats’ plan. So I don’t think a lot of people understand that — they are the ones that set the end date for these subsidies, and now all of a sudden, they’re not supporting it anymore. 

We’ve got a broken system. We recognize that. We know it’s very difficult for federal workers, so the Democrats need to support us in supporting their original plan. Let’s open the federal government and make sure workers get paid.

President Trump has proposed the idea of laying off thousands of federal workers if the shutdown continues. Could you speak more as to why you support that move?

Because I have done “squeal” studies for over 10 years now in the federal government, and we have a lot of waste and bloat in the bureaucracy here in Washington, D.C., and just all across the board in the federal government. 

I just did a floor speech that talks about a number of these bureaucrats and those who have really bad behaviors. For example, one woman, who was employed by Housing and Urban Development, was actually claiming to work three different full-time federal government jobs. That’s literally impossible. She was billing the federal government for over 24 hours every single day. 

And this happens not just in this one instance, but in other instances. So when we catch bad behaviors — people obviously not showing up to a job, but they’re getting paid for a job, they’re billing the federal government, they’re billing all of you as taxpayers, and they’re defrauding the federal government. So that’s a bad behavior, a bad example. 

But there are a lot of jobs like that, that they’re claiming nobody’s actually working in them — we probably don’t need those positions then. So let’s save the taxpayers some dollars and get rid of the excess bloat in the federal government and make it much more efficient.

If not attached to the continuing resolution, would you support extending the Affordable Care Act tax subsidies for families under 400 percent of the federal poverty level?

Everything is on the table, so I would most certainly take a look at that. But what I would say is that reforms have to be put into place. This is a broken system, and the ones that are making out are the insurance companies. 

There are many, many constituents or citizens out there that they’re covering, that have signed up for these health plans, and those people have no idea they were signed up for those health plans. So, what the health insurance companies are doing is drawing payment from the federal government on those premiums every single month, and whoever is supposedly signed up for it has no idea that they are on those health insurance plans. 

The insurance companies have scammed the federal government, and we need to put reforms in place to make sure that those scams are not going on anymore. 

One thing that is really important to conservatives and for those of us in the Republican Party is making sure that those who are here illegally do not receive the benefit from those types of plans, either, so directing all of those subsidies to American citizens.