On anniversary of shutdown, the government stays funded
WASHINGTON – Even amid the rancor of impeachment, Congress and the White House found a way to do what they were unable to do last year: keep the government running.
A $1.4 trillion spending package that President Donald Trump signed into law late Friday will fund federal departments and agencies through the end of September and avoid a repeat of last winter’s record-setting 35-day government shutdown, which began one year ago Sunday.
“One hopes they learned something – that shutting down the government is the equivalent of burning your house down, and no one won,” said Max Stier, president and chief executive officer of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group focused on improving government effectiveness.
A quarter of the federal government shut down last Dec. 22 and remained shuttered until Jan. 25 because of a budget stalemate between Trump and congressional Democrats. The shutdown marked the 21st time since the Carter administration that a lapse in funding had shuttered the government for one day or more.
No one in Washington seems eager to go through that experience again.
Not Trump, who triggered last winter’s shutdown with his demands for $5.7 billion in border wall funding but ended up getting just $1.375 billion for border “barrier” construction. Trump asked for $8 billion for his border wall during the most recent budget talks, but lawmakers kept the funding level at $1.375 billion. Trump signed the spending package anyway – even though, according to The Washington Post, senior administration officials had threatened a presidential veto over language regarding military aid to Ukraine.
Not members of Congress, who have introduced various pieces of legislation to avoid another shutdown. One bipartisan proposal by Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., would automatically fund the government at existing levels if a new budget isn’t in place at the beginning of a fiscal year and would force lawmakers to stay in Washington until a new spending bill is signed into law.
And certainly not hundreds of thousands of federal workers who were forced to go on furlough or work without pay during the last shutdown, causing missed mortgage payments and other financial hardships. Federal workers not only came out of the recent budget talks unscathed – they even got a 3.1% raise.
The historic shutdown of 2018-2019 grabbed policymakers’ attention in a way that others did not.
Social media may have been a galvanizing factor, a recent report by Stier’s group suggests.
“The longest shutdown in federal government history took place in an environment where nearly every member of the public is armed with a smartphone and the media is hungry for content to fill a 24-hour news cycle,” the report said.
The result was “a steady diet of stories and images of the toll that the shutdown was taking across the country,” the report said.
The toll was especially visible in national parks, which lost as much as $14 million in uncollected entrance fees and faced other financial challenges due to lost labor and stalled maintenance projects. Overflowing garbage cans and unsanitary restrooms were a common site at treasured landmarks because many of the rangers and other workers who staff campgrounds and keep the parks running had been furloughed.
Yet the effects of the shutdown linger a year later, particularly on the federal workforce. No jobs were eliminated, and workers received back pay for lost wages. But the shutdown sank employee morale and exacerbated the government’s struggle in recruiting new workers, according to the Partnership for Public Service report.