The US government remains shut down. Photo / Jabin Botsford, The Washington Post
The ongoing US government shutdown will collide with the country’s economy this week, as missed pay cheques and the absence of billions of dollars of government services reverberate beyond federal workers and sting the broader public.
President Donald Trump and lawmakers in Congress remain deadlocked heading into a third week of shuttered federal agencies. Republicans control both chambers of Congress, but lack the votes in the Senate to defeat a filibuster of legislation to fund ongoing operations. Democrats insist that Trump and the GOP must cut a deal to preserve health insurance subsidies as part of an agreement to reopen the government.
The shutdown has already caused nationwide flight delays, closed taxpayer help lines at the Internal Revenue Service, snarled permitting approvals at the Environmental Protection Agency and Transportation Department, and shut off access to national parks.
Workers vital to national security and protecting government property remain on the job unpaid, but others – some 750,000, according to congressional bookkeepers – have been furloughed. The Trump administration laid off some 4000 workers last week.
At the weekend, the President ordered the Pentagon to repurpose research and development funding to make payroll for members of the military, who were set to miss their first salary payment. But civilian employees won’t see the same treatment – and the Trump administration’s budget office also argued in a draft opinion last week that furloughed workers are not entitled to back pay when the shutdown ends.
The first wave of missed pay cheques is likely to hurt the underlying economy in many communities. And the longer other services remain shut off, the more the shutdown’s effects will spread.
Consumers are already facing mounting economic uncertainty. The last Government shutdown – a 34-day closure during Trump’s first term, the longest closure in US history – shaved US$11 billion off the country’s economic output, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“When those pay cheques start to dry up, and military is a big one, that’s when purchases, child care, buying basic things like groceries – that’s when it starts to impact people beyond the Government,” said G William Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank. “It’s a slow burn, but it gets worse as it goes on.”
Across the country, food banks are stocking up on provisions and community service organisations are telling at-risk clients to warn their lenders of the potential for missed payments, leaders of the groups told The Washington Post. Small business owners are keeping a close eye on their foot traffic. Federal workers are preparing their families for some financial belt-tightening.
“Families around the country are already seeing the impacts, and it’s about to get a whole lot worse,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said. “The American people are going to feel a lot more pain and miss a lot more pay cheques in the near future.”
Across the nation, the shutdown is beginning to turn up the pain for food banks reliant on federal funds.
In Philadelphia, serving the hungry has gotten more difficult for one of the region’s largest food banks, said George Matysik, the executive director of Share Food Programme.
Before the shutdown, demand for Share’s services had already gone up by 120%, Matysik said, as the nonprofit saw US$8.5 million worth of federal resources vanish under the Trump administration’s cuts to federal spending.
“I have never seen our warehouse as empty as it has been in the last three months,” Matysik said. “And on top of all this, we’re now layering a shutdown.”
The organisation runs a delivery programme for seniors, dropping off 30-pound boxes of food for 7000 clients each month, Matysik said. Share has enough surplus stock to continue deliveries for another month, he said, but is looking into how to continue the programme in case federal help remains shut off.
In Colorado, service members and veterans have been flooding the phones of Homefront Military Network, a nonprofit that helps military families in financial and community support, said Kate Hatten, the group’s executive director.
“A lot of the calls we’ve been getting over the past few days have been concern in anticipation of not getting a pay cheque on the 15th,” she said.
Most callers are worried about food insecurity, she said, but also about paying utility bills or making their mortgage and car payments.
“Missing a pay cheque or having one catastrophic expense is a problem for a lot of people across the nation, regardless of whether they’re actively serving in the military,” Hatten said. “And I think that the challenge now in general is that the cost of living outpaces pay raises and housing allowances and benefits cheques and all those sorts of things.”
At several federal agencies, meanwhile, some services have been put on ice for the duration of the shutdown.
Early on, Social Security Administration staff were given a list of activities that must stop, according to emails reviewed by The Post and several employees who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Among the items on pause: benefit verification letters, which Social Security gives people so they can finalise their eligibility for state benefits like food stamps; subsidised housing and old age pensions; and earning corrections, which are issued when someone reports missing income.
Also halted are any interactions with “third parties,” including some attorneys and disability advocacy groups.
All of those services are essential for people who rely on them.
“Callers are already expressing frustration about the limits of our work, specifically when they’re asking us to complete something that we’ve discontinued due to the lapse in funding,” the employee said.
Jonathan Stewart, an air traffic control supervisor who handled flights in and around Newark Liberty International Airport, said the system was showing signs of cracking just a few days into the shutdown.
“When you further stress out an already stressed-out career field, controllers are going to be in no way fit to control airplanes,” said Stewart, who is out on trauma leave after technology outages at his facility in the spring left controllers unable to communicate with aircraft. “It’s as simple as a field already stressed to the max. What is happening is pretty clearly predictable for anyone with any knowledge of it at all.”
Controllers’ last paycheck will come Tuesday, deepening the uncertainty they face as the shutdown drags on and threatening to make deepen flight delays.
“The closer it gets to end of the pay period, the more distracted people are getting,” said a controller at a major West Coast facility, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk about his work. “Sure, no one is not trying to, but we are all definitely distracted. It’s the topic of conversation while we are working. And then distraction itself is a safety risk.”
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