Previous posts have discussed government shutdowns. Another one looms.
The U.S. is on the verge of a 22nd government shutdown in five decades, with Congress facing a Sept. 30 deadline to pass appropriations bills to fund the government. https://t.co/nw6ktYazQX
— Axios (@axios) September 24, 2023
While we are heartened to learn that communities, businesses and religious organizations around the country are providing assistance to DHS employees, this cannot and should not be the answer. One of the unfortunate consequences of this shutdown is the need for some DHS employees to seek either unemployment or find another employer. It is important to note that as unattractive as these alternatives may be, like other members of the military services, members of the USCG by law, cannot quit nor can they seek full-time outside employment. DHS employees who protect the traveling public, investigate and counter terrorism, and protect critical infrastructure should not have to rely on the charitable generosity of others for assistance in feeding their families and paying their bills while they steadfastly focus on the mission at hand. This is unconscionable.
As the shutdown drags on, the Department also risks talented people leaving their posts to pursue employment in the private sector. High-tech skills – such as information technology and cybersecurity –and law enforcement and security experience are in great demand in the private sector and the Department is facing a real crisis in retaining this workforce week after week.A statement from the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) President Paul Rinaldi, Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) President Joe DePete, and Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) President Sara Nelson:
We are awed by the sacrifices that the men and women of DHS and their families make every day and their extraordinary service to our nation. We call on our elected leaders to restore the funding necessary to ensure our homeland remains safe and that the Department’s critical national security functions continue without compromise.
“We have a growing concern for the safety and security of our members, our airlines, and the traveling public due to the government shutdown. This is already the longest government shutdown in the history of the United States and there is no end in sight. In our risk averse industry, we cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break. It is unprecedented.
“Due to the shutdown, air traffic controllers, transportation security officers, safety inspectors, air marshals, federal law enforcement officers, FBI agents, and many other critical workers have been working without pay for over a month. Staffing in our air traffic control facilities is already at a 30-year low and controllers are only able to maintain the system’s efficiency and capacity by working overtime, including 10-hour days and 6-day workweeks at many of our nation’s busiest facilities. Due to the shutdown, the FAA has frozen hiring and shuttered its training academy, so there is no plan in effect to fill the FAA’s critical staffing need. Even if the FAA were hiring, it takes two to four years to become fully facility certified and achieve Certified Professional Controller (CPC) status. Almost 20% of CPCs are eligible to retire today. There are no options to keep these professionals at work without a paycheck when they can no longer afford to support their families. When they elect to retire, the National Airspace System (NAS) will be crippled.
“The situation is changing at a rapid pace. Major airports are already seeing security checkpoint closures, with many more potentially to follow. Safety inspectors and federal cyber security staff are not back on the job at pre-shutdown levels, and those not on furlough are working without pay. Last Saturday, TSA management announced that a growing number of officers cannot come to work due to the financial toll of the shutdown. In addition, we are not confident that system-wide analyses of safety reporting data, which is used to identify and implement corrective actions in order to reduce risks and prevent accidents is 100 percent operational due to reduced FAA resources.
If the FBI and Department of Justice ("DOJ") are not funded, the Agents will continue to face challenges in carrying out our mission to protect the nation. Some of the specific ways the shutdown affects our Agents and operations were highlighted in the FIBAA’s petition:
1. FBI Special Agents are subject to high security standards that include rigorous and routine financial background checks.… Missing payments on debts could create delays in securing or renewing security clearances, and could even disqualify Agents from continuing to serve in some cases.
2. The operations of the FBI require funding. As the shutdown continues, Special Agents remain at work for the American people without being paid, and FBI leadership is doing all it can to fund FBI operations with increasingly limited resources—this situation is not sustainable.
3. Pay uncertainty undermines the FBI’s ability to recruit and retain high-caliber professionals....The ongoing financial insecurity caused by the failure to fund the FBI could lead some FBIAgents to consider career options that provide more stability for their families.Quotations from field agents:.
Two days ago, our financial office advised that the division has exhausted [Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force ('OCDETF')] operational funding.… We are in the middle of a critical OCDETF investigation targeting kilo-quantity trafficking of methamphetamine and heroin by street gang members…. Without money to pay sources and conduct controlled narcotics purchases, our task force is unable to continue these critical investigations. This task force is the only task force in this region specifically targeting interstate street gang criminal activities.
...
I have been working a long term MS-13 investigation for over three years. We have indicted 23 MS-13 gang members for racketeering, murder in aid of racketeering, extortion, money laundering and weapons offenses.… Since the shutdown, I have not had a Spanish speaker in the Division. We have several Spanish speaking informants. We are only able to communicate using a three way call with a linguist in another division.
Your Coast Guard leadership team & the American people stand in awe of your continued dedication to duty, resilience, & that of your families. I find it unacceptable that @USCG members must rely on food pantries & donations to get through day-to-day life. #uscg pic.twitter.com/TZ9ppUidyO— Admiral Karl Schultz (@ComdtUSCG) January 23, 2019
Paying employees for work they were not allowed to perform was the highest cost identified in a report the Obama administration commissioned that estimated the price of a 2013 government shutdown. President Barack Obama’s Office of Management and Budget estimated total compensation costs — pay and benefits — for workers affected by that shutdown at $2.5 billion. It lasted 16 days, which is shorter than the current shutdown.Second, the government will miss out on collecting certain taxes and fees.
Laws called the Prompt Payment Act and the Cash Management Improvement Act require the federal government to pay interest on contracts, grants and other obligations that it is unable to fund during the shutdown. If, for example, NASA is unable to pay a contracting company on time during a shutdown, it will still have to pay that money once operations resume — plus some extra. The Prompt Payment interest rate for the first half of this year is 3.625 percent, according to the Treasury Department.Finally, the shutdown will hurt the economy.
The longer the shutdown lasts, the faster the economy could fall. If the government stops issuing nutrition assistance for low-income families, if agencies can’t process federally backed home loans, if unpaid airport security workers call out sick en masse and air travel is strangled — that could add up to a major economic disruption.Megan Cerullo at CBS:
Average weekly direct and indirect costs of the partial shutdown, which began Dec. 22, currently add up to $1.2 billion, according to Beth Ann Bovino, S&P Global's U.S. chief economist. Monday marked the start of the shutdown's fifth week, and the closure will have caused roughly $6 billion in damage to the economy if the government does not reopen by the end of the week, Bovino estimated in a recent research note.
And the average weekly cost of the shutdown is expected to grow as the damage to industries and consumers both widens and deepens. "The longer this shutdown drags on, the more collateral damage the economy will suffer," Bovino wrote.
Direct effects of the marathon shutdown include lost productivity from the hundreds of thousands of furloughed workers who haven't been paid since the Dec. 22 closure. While the precise impact has not been calculated, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that federal employees' lost hours during a 16-day shutdown back in October 2013 reduced fourth-quarter GDP by 0.3 percentage points.
The Coast Guard's 41,000 active-duty members will not be paid on their next payday, scheduled for Jan. 15, due to lack of appropriations in the ongoing government shutdown, the service's vice commandant said Thursday.
Active-duty Coast Guardsmen received a paycheck Dec. 28 as the result of a workaround by the Department of Homeland Security, Coast Guard, and Office of Management and Budget, which ruled that the service had the authority to issue all pay and allowances for December.
But in an all-hands message dated Jan. 10, Adm. Charles Ray said no reprieve will occur Jan. 15: The service is unable to cover its payroll.Dan Lamothe at WP:
Employees of the U.S. Coast Guard who are facing a long U.S. government shutdown just received a suggestion: To get by without pay, consider holding a garage sale, babysitting, dog-walking or serving as a “mystery shopper.”
The suggestions were part of a five-page tip sheet published by the Coast Guard Support Program, an employee-assistance arm of the service often known as CG SUPRT. It is designated to offer Coast Guard members help with mental-health issues or other concerns about their lives, including financial wellness.
“Bankruptcy is a last option,” the document said.
The Coast Guard receives funding from the Department of Homeland Security and is subjected to the shuttering of parts of the government along with DHS’s other agencies. That stands in contrast to other military services, which are part of the Defense Department and have funding.
The tip sheet, titled “Managing your finances during a furlough,” applies to the Coast Guard’s 8,500-person civilian workforce. About 6,400 of them are on indefinite furlough, while 2,100 are working without pay after being identified as essential workers, said Lt. Cmdr. Scott McBride, a service spokesman. They were last paid for the two-week period ended Dec. 22.
...
The Coast Guard removed the tip sheet from the support program’s website late Wednesday morning after The Washington Post inquired about it.Coast Guard civilian employee Geoff Anderson writes at The Times of San Diego:
Politicians do not value the Coast Guard as much as the other military services. They are funded while the Coast Guard is not. The Department of Homeland Security lumps the Coast Guard in with 13 other “operational and support components,” when in fact it is nothing like them. It is military, it is global, and no other DHS organization can approach the scope and reach of its mission.
Arguments about whether DHS should be the parent agency for Coast Guard aside, politicians and the general public mistakenly equate “military” with “Department of Defense,” to the detriment of the Coast Guard. One can imagine the public outrage if other military branches were required to work without pay for this long.
In summary, most of the general public and politicians in Washington don’t understand the Coast Guard and take it for granted. That statement probably also applies to every federal worker affected by this shutdown, regardless of organization.
Nope. The Anti-Deficiency Act includes an exception for the “safety of human life or the protection of property.” Subsequent opinions of the Attorney General (found in appendices here), opinions of the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel, and guidance of GAO / Comptroller General have clarified what does and does not fall under this exception. In past shutdowns, OMB opinions have considered the following types of things to fall under the exception: military and national security, public safety such as air traffic control, care of patients in hospitals and prisoners in prisons (and wildlife at the national zoo), things necessary to protect federal property and continue the functions of the Treasury, and disaster relief, among other things. Under common sense interpretations, the heat can also be left on at federal buildings.
Don’t let all these exceptions distort the bottom line: if no appropriations bills have been enacted, the vast majority of federal agencies will largely shut down, and sizable portion of the federal civilian workforce will be furloughed. You can see the percentages here.
,..
As always, my recommendation is to go the most recent CRS report on the topic (I used to be a co-author of it.) It has all the citations and links you could ever dream of to lead you to the primary source material you need to keep yourself busy for a whole weekend reading about this stuff.
Government shutdowns are familiar to most Americans, but they’re a relatively recent development. They are the result of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. Since then, Congress has failed to authorize funding for the federal government on 18 separate occasions. The first six of those didn’t actually affect the functioning of government at all. It wasn’t until a set of opinions issued by Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti in 1980 and ’81 that the government started treating “funding gaps”— periods when Congress has failed to allocate funds for the ongoing functions of government — as necessitating the full or partial shutdown of government agencies.At Business Insider, Bob Bryan writes: " This is the first time that one party has controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House during a shutdown in which federal employees are furloughed."
That's because most department employees fall into exempted categories of workers who stay on the job in a shutdown because they perform work considered necessary to protect human life and property. Even in a shutdown, most workers across agencies, including the Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency and Customs and Border Protection, would continue to report to work.
Indeed, of the agency's approximately 230,000 employees, some 200,000 of them would keep working even if Congress fails to fund their agency. It's a reality that was on display during the 16-day government-wide shutdown in the fall of 2013, when national parks and monuments closed but essential government functions kept running, albeit sometimes on reduced staff.Airport security checkpoints would remain staffed, the Secret Service would continue to protect the president and other dignitaries, the Coast Guard would stay on patrol, immigration agents would still be on the job.
So what of the sometimes overheated rhetoric, often from Democrats trying to prove a political point?
"If this goes to shutdown," Mikulski said, "this could close down ports up and down the East Coast, because if you don't have a Coast Guard, you don't have the ports. You don't have the ports, you don't have an economy."
But if the department loses its money, the Coast Guard will stay in operation and so will the ports.
There would be one big change, though. Most workers would not get paid until the shutdown ends, a circumstance guaranteed to put pressure on members of Congress hearing from constituents angry about going without their paychecks
Americans start the new year with a variety of national concerns on their minds. Although none is dominant, the government, at 21%, leads the list of what Americans consider the most important problem facing the country. The economy closely follows at 18%, and then unemployment/jobs and healthcare, each at 16%. No other issue is mentioned by as much as 10% of the public; however, the federal budget deficit or debt comes close, at 8%.
Americans' current telling of the top problems facing the country comes from a Jan. 5-8 Gallup poll. The rank order is similar to what Gallup found in December, although the percentage mentioning unemployment has risen four percentage points to 16%.
Mentions of the government as the top problem remain higher than they were prior to the partial government shutdown in October. During the shutdown, the percentage naming the government as the top problem doubled to 33% from 16% in September.
Compared with a year ago, mentions of government are up slightly. Mentions of healthcare, on the other hand, have quadrupled -- from 4% in January 2013 to 16% today, likely related to highly visible problems with the rollout of the 2010 healthcare law. At the same time, references to the federal deficit or debt have declined from 20% to 8%, while mentions of the economy in general have dipped from 21% to 18%, and mentions of unemployment/jobs are the same, at 16%.
Public trust in the government, already quite low, has edged even lower in a survey conducted just before the Oct. 16 agreement to end the government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling.
Just 19% say that they trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time, down seven points since January. The current measure matches the level reached in August 2011, following the last battle over the debt ceiling. Explore a Pew Research interactive on Public Trust in Government: 1958-2013.
The share of the public saying they are angry at the federal government, which equaled an all-time high in late September (26%), has ticked up to 30%. Another 55% say they are frustrated with the government. Just 12% say they are basically content with the federal government.
Despite highly negative views of the federal government overall, the public has favorable views of many of its agencies and departments, which were closed by the shutdown. Majorities have favorable opinions of 12 of 13 agencies tested – with the IRS the lone exception (44% favorable).
...
Republicans have less positive views than Democrats of several of the agencies and departments included in the survey. The biggest difference is in opinions of the IRS: 65% of Democrats have a favorable opinion of the IRS compared with 40% of independents and just 23% of Republicans.
The national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Oct. 3-6 among 1,000 adults, finds 44% say Republican leaders should give ground on their demand that any budget deal include cuts or delays to the 2010 health care law. Nearly as many (42%) say it is Obama who should give ground, by agreeing to changes in the health care law.
Even when asked if the only way to end the shutdown soon is for their side to give ground on the health care issue, most are unwilling to back down. A majority of Democrats (58%) say it would be unacceptable for Obama to agree to cuts or delays in the Affordable Care Act, even if this is the only way to resolve the shutdown soon. Roughly the same share of Republicans (54%) say it would be unacceptable for GOP leaders to agree to any deal that does not include cuts or delays to Obamacare.
In the last few weeks, Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute wrote that Madison wouldn’t let President Barack Obama bomb Syria without authorization from Congress; Lyle Denniston of the National Constitution Center and Bloomberg View columnist Cass R. Sunstein each wrote that Madison would deplore the factionalism that has shut down the federal government; William Bennett and Christopher Beach wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Madison would scorn Congress and its staff members for exempting themselves from the provisions of the Affordable Care Act; and Jeffrey Anderson wrote that the health-care measure, though it is the law of the land, hasn’t been ratified by what Madison called “the cool and deliberate sense of the community.”At The Washington Post, Dylan Matthews says Madison is behind gridlock, which is a bad thing:
But the deeper answer is that it's James Madison's fault. This week's shutdown is only the latest symptom of an underlying disease in our democracy whose origins lie in the Constitution and some supremely misguided ideas that made their way into it in 1787, and found their fullest exposition in Madison's Federalist no. 51. And that disease is rapidly getting worse.
...'
The thesis of Federalist 51 is that elections alone are insufficient to guard against the possibility that a government will encroach upon the rights of citizens, either by a majority faction oppressing others or through all-out tyranny. "A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government," Madison writes, "but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."
Subsequent experience, however, has shown Madison to be incorrect. New Zealand, Norway, Israel and Sweden all have unicameral parliaments whose leader serves as the executive, with only a weak monarch or powerless president and (in some cases) the judiciary to check them. None of those countries have collapsed into despotism as a result. The UK, Japan, Germany, Spain, Canada and the Netherlands have upper houses of parliament that are formally much weaker than the lower houses, and each has the leader of its lower house serve as executive. No coups d'état ensued in those places either.Michael Barone says Madisonianism is a good thing:
The problem was caused by James Madison. And by the 39 other men who signed the Constitution in 1787.
The problem, of course, is the government shutdown. It was caused because the Framers of the Constitution wisely provided for separation of powers among the three branches of government.
...
That understanding, together with the constitutional structure, imposes something like a duty of consultation between the president and members of Congress. Otherwise — and you may have heard about this — the government will have to shut down.
...
Republicans are furious that their members can’t defund or delay Obamacare. They want to see politicians stand up yelling, “No!” Theater has a function in politics.
But in fact, they’ve had a partial victory this year, a win that didn’t seem likely last December. By accepting the sequester despite its defense cuts, Republicans have actually dialed down domestic discretionary spending.
Democrats’ position now is essentially the sequester. They’re swallowing something they hate. No wonder Obama seems sullen.
So both sides will have frustratingly partial victories and not get everything they want. That’s how James Madison’s system is supposed to work in a closely divided country.