BATON ROUGE - A bill introduced by Louisiana Congressman Garrett Graves this week seeks to eliminate the penalty for early withdrawals from federal and personal retirement accounts for federal workers.

The bill would remove the 10% penalty for excepted, furloughed and federally contracted employees impacted by the ongoing shutdown. It would also remove any limitation on the number of distributions from the retirement accounts of affected workers.

The announcement comes the same day Governor John Bel Edwards extended unemployment benefits to federal employees working through the shutdown.