Report details costs of budget standoff
WASHINGTON — Lost work: 6.6 million days. Back-pay costs: $2 billion. Private-sector jobs lost: 120,000.
Those are just some of the costs of the 16-day partial government shutdown that ended last month, President Barack Obama’s administration said in a report released Thursday.
The report comes as a second shutdown remains a possibility unless Congress can pass a budget or provide more stopgap financing for the government.
But top Republicans, wary since the backlash to the October shutdown, have made it clear they do not intend to force another impasse. A bipartisan group of legislators is working behind closed doors on a budget agreement, but expectations for a major deal are low, given the policy gulf between Democrats and Republicans.
The House-Senate negotiating committee has a mid-De-
on the Web
cember deadline, and the government’s financing expires again in January. The Treasury would lose the authority to issue new debt in February.
“This manufactured crisis damaged the economy, cost us jobs and hurt middle-class families,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “The American people deserve a government that works as hard as they do. It’s time to hear from the middle-of-roaders. It’s time to work together on a bipartisan basis.”
The most direct cost, the report said, is the $2 billion in back pay that will go to federal workers who were furloughed. Government agencies — from the sprawling State Department to the tiny Export-Import Bank — were ordered to send nonessential workers home, resulting in about 40 percent of civilian federal employees going off the clock. (That included four of the five Nobel laureates who are researchers for the government, the report said.)
In all, the shutdown led to 6.6 million days of lost work, paid for by the taxpayer. Many federal contractors also furloughed employees during the shutdown, and those workers might not receive back pay.
Other direct costs come from missed fees from national parks, interest due on late payments, the curtailing of tax enforcement actions and certain stop-work orders.
“Millions of Americans were impacted by the shutdown, due to furloughs of federal employees, reduced services for the public and delays in payments to federal grantees, states, localities, contractors and individuals,” Sylvia Mathews Burwell, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in the report.
On top of that, the economy is absorbing costs from delays and disruptions to government services, and from a sharp blow to consumer and business confidence. The report runs through a long list of the disruptions: a backlog in veterans’ disability claims, children left out of Head Start, patients left out of cancer studies, halted consumer-safety work and delays in certain tax refunds.
The report said that the government had not calculated the costs of actually shutting the government down and reopening it. But it described them as significant.
Ultimately, disruptions like the shutdown might discourage workers from taking government jobs, analysts have said.