The U.S. Senate voted in December to approve a stop-gap spending bill (without funding for Trump’s border wall) that would have averted the current government shutdown. The House passed a similar measure in early January to reopen the government. Majorities in both houses of Congress (each of which is controlled by a different party) think the government should be open right now, without wall funding. For what it’s worth, we also have close to two-thirds of voters saying the same thing, according to a survey conducted by Quinnipiac University last week.
You don’t get that much bipartisan support for much in America these days. Yet, here we are, in what is now the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history.
There is one reason for that: President Donald Trump has decided to take hostages until his demands are met. These hostages are his own government’s employees, and with more broad and diffuse effects, all of the rest of us.
How this is supposed to work is that Congress acts like the coequal branch of government and check on presidential power that it is and advances a bill, the essence of which both houses have already voted in support of. When the bill gets vetoed, Congress sees if it can override the veto with a two-thirds majority. That’s Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution. But when you have a Republican Senate majority too cowardly to let a bill advance that they know will be vetoed, well, we wait until the financial impact of the shutdown takes its toll.
That impact is big. Broadly speaking, the U.S. economy had lost $3.6 billion by the end of last week due to direct and indirect costs of the shutdown, according to a report from S&P Global Ratings. Federal contractors are not getting paid, and won’t get backpay. The Securities and Exchange Commission cannot expediently process planned initial public offerings. Farmers’ applications for disaster relief money are not being processed while the USDA is closed, and neither are their applications for aid and loans meant to offset the effects of Trump’s trade war. National parks and monuments are closed and/or are understaffed messes, if you can get to them at all with the challenges the TSA is facing at the airports. Speaking of air travel, Delta Air Lines says it is losing $25 million this month because fewer people are flying during the shutdown. While there is no way to know now what the total impact of this shutdown will be on GDP growth, the October 2013 government shutdown, which lasted just 16 days, reduced American GDP growth by 0.3 percent, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The work being done by furloughed federal workers and federal contractors matters to the economy. And then there are the individual financial impacts on the workers themselves. There has been no shortage of reporting on these, and while the furloughed federal workers — and those continuing to work without pay — will eventually receive backpay, it is still a struggle for people with fixed monthly expenses to figure out how to get by in the meantime.
Personally, I have several friends who work for the federal government, and they are all veterans — overall, nearly a third of federal workers are veterans. These federal workers, who have sacrificed a lot for this country, first in the armed services and now as civilian federal workers who provide services that improve millions of people’s lives, are not only going unpaid, but they are being used as a means to an end. They’ve been taken as hostages in an attempt to circumvent the prescribed constitutional process, so that the nation’s chief executive can get what he wants without congressional support. That’s undemocratic, and it’s unappreciative of people who have already given more than their fair share to this country.
The financial impacts of the ongoing government shutdown are not insignificant. If you can help a furloughed federal worker with those, I hope you do. But I also hope you give your support to furloughed federal workers in other ways. These are people. They matter. Their work matters. And they deserve to know it.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
Support Your Furloughed Federal Friends, Trump’s Government Shutdown Hostages curated from Above the Law
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