When a trash can gets full and there’s a government shutdown,
people don’t stop throwing stuff on top of it.
But I did manage to pick up a couple truckloads of trash before I was told:
“Don’t do it anymore.”
People were not even able to volunteer during the government shutdown.
"Stop the shutdown, stop the shutdown!"
The US is the only country in the world where the government can actually shut down.
And the threat looms nearly every year.
"Seven days until shut down—"
"Four days—"
"T-minus six days—"
"Five days—"
"Government shutdown at midnight tonight."
I just feel my gut in my chest - like, ugh, not again.
So, why does the US even shut down?
And what happens when it does?
“You travel 3,500 miles to America and find that they shut down!”
Every government in the world has to do the same thing:
decide how to spend the country’s money.
In the US, they do that by passing spending bills,
called appropriations bills,
that give these federal agencies their budgets.
It happens every year — or every fiscal year.
Japan is April 1st.
In Kenya, it's July 1st.
In the US, it’s October 1st.
And if the government misses that deadline...
The budget wasn't passed.
We have no money.
And then, "Oh, you have to come to work anyway."
Just not getting paid.
We did get back pay, but, still, you have to wait for that.
The saddest thing I’ve ever seen was seeing all these hard working people in a line
for their food bank.
It’s the conversation at the dinner table every single night.
“Well, Dad, do you know when you’re gonna get paid again?"
No. I don’t.
It’s the way the US government was set up. Kind of.
The answer to why we have government shutdowns actually starts in the Constitution.
“No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.”
And so what that really means
is that before any federal money can be spent, there has to be
an actual appropriations law allowing it.
But that can be interpreted in different ways
and it has changed over time.
Back in the 1800’s there were no shutdowns.
But there were other problems.
Agencies would routinely blow through their budgets
then keep spending
and would come back to Congress and ask for more.
So Congress passed the Antideficiency Act.
It tells federal officials that they really, really can't spend money without an appropriation.
But that didn’t stop the government from missing their deadline, and creating long gaps in funding.
As recently as the 1970s, there were plenty of these funding gaps. And yet...
The agency sort of pretty much just kept going.
It couldn't possibly be that Congress wanted them to shut down
if there was no budget bill passed on time, right?
But what happened was in the early 1980s,
the attorney general issued two opinions that tightened up this interpretation.
The opinions basically said
no seriously, unless Congress has passed an appropriations bill
agencies can’t spend any money.
Including to employ the services of their employees.
Even though there technically is money, we have no access to it.
And since then, the US has shutdown-shutdown many times.
1996 was the first big one, for three weeks.
And 2019 was the longest in history, so far.
I actually got to work and they was like,
“We’re all furloughed. They shut the building down.”
I was like, “Oh, the doors are not opening right now?”
They were like, “No. It's shut down completely.”
I was like, “What is a furlough? What’s going on?”
I couldn’t work. I couldn’t go in.
We weren’t even allowed to check email.
So I ended up picking up side jobs trying to make ends-meet.
These are all the agencies of the federal government.
Here are the ones that actually shutdown in 1996.
And in 2019.
Shutdowns don't have to be of the whole government.
So it might just be that one set of agencies didn't get funded.
Congress couldn't reach agreement with each other and with the president
on whether that set of agencies would get funded.
But the rest of the government was funded perfectly well.
In 2019, around 800,000 federal employees didn’t get a paycheck for 35 days.
But more than half of them still had to go into work.
Because there are some jobs that the Attorney General said
are exempt from stopping completely,
what we call “essential” employees.
So while the Department of Transportation was shut down,
air traffic controllers still had to work.
I don’t show up with a headset and just do that job by myself.
All the other aviation safety professionals that assist us and help us on a daily basis
are now taken away.
Homeland Security shut down but TSA workers still had to show up.
Without pay.
We’re one of the lowest paid agencies.
Not receiving a check every two weeks was hard.
People on the floor were smiling and greeting everyone,
but behind closed doors in the break room we had people breaking down.
National Parks lost millions in entry fees.
Wildfire mitigation projects were delayed.
Immigration court hearings — backlogged.
And, there were thousands of contractors that work with all of these agencies
who were also affected.
If you were just working on a contract with a company,
you did not get back pay. At all.
My son has chronic asthma — couldn’t afford his medicine.
I felt like I was...
I was disappointed in them and it wasn’t even my fault.
And a shutdown isn’t just centralized in Washington, DC.
Only 15 percent of all federal employees live in that area.
Which means the economic-impact is country-wide.
Shutting down not only affects the federal workers.
If people aren’t getting paid, they’re not going out to eat.
There is a severe economic impact to something like that,
especially in a town like Huntsville.
Overall, the US economy lost $11 billion during the 2019 shutdown.
Some of that was regained when employees received their back pay,
but the damage was done.
And the thing is, this doesn't have to happen.
The legal framework explains why we end up having to have shutdowns as a matter of law.
But why we have shutdowns truly is a matter of politics,
which is that the more polarized the parties are and the more divided our government is,
the harder time Congress and the president have working out a budget agreement.
And having divisive politics isn’t uniquely American.
In Belgium, there have been times where the politics were so bad,
they just didn’t have a government.
We didn’t really notice any difference.
Our daily lives didn’t really change much.
I don’t think the government could really like — stop.
Most countries couldn’t.
In nearly every other country,
if the government were to fail to pass a budget by the deadline,
agencies would just continue working with last year’s budget.
There’s a push to do that in the US, too.
Just have an automatic, temporary appropriations bill pass when the deadline is missed.
The opposing argument to that is "Whoa, whoa, whoa."
"This is the one time we have every year to reset
and to kind of work things out and so where would the incentive go?"
Congress has passed fewer and fewer laws each year.
Passing these appropriations bills has become
the one time they’re kind of forced to agree on something.
And as the political ideology of each Congress grows further apart each year,
the likelihood of them agreeing on time kind of goes down.
So every fall...
"Washington’s version of groundhog day."
"Another government shutdown looms."
We are caught as pawns -
Pawns in an ultimate game as a federal employee in a conversation that has nothing to do with us.
We’re not going to work increasing the profit of a CEO.
We’re doing public services and now I’m not going to get a paycheck? That’s crazy.