The government shutdown will begin at 12:01 a.m. on Sunday morning. This much we know. Everything else is sort of up in the air.
How many of the 300,000 federal workers are going to be forced to go to work without getting paid? We know that air traffic controllers, border patrol agents, FDA inspectors, and a few other “essential” employees are going to be working for free.
There will also be an unknown number of federal employees who will be furloughed—most without pay. Social Security and Medicare will continue to pay benefits, but there won’t be any new clients for those agencies.
If Iran attacks, our soldiers will — presumably — fight back. The VA will continue to pay benefits. But defense contractors are going to have to wait to be paid for all those shiny new toys the Pentagon ordered.
Perhaps the most interesting problem with the shutdown is the Federal Aviation Administration’s dilemma. The FAA is facing a double whammy — the entire agency needs to be reauthorized to function, plus, they won’t have any money to pay employees.
Planes won’t be dropping out of the sky because the air traffic controllers will work without pay. “But the training of new air traffic controllers would cease, work on technology upgrades would be disrupted, and the agency would lose more than $50 million a day in revenue from taxes on airline tickets and fuel that help to fund its operations,” according to the Washington Post.
So, it will be a mess but hardly a catastrophe. The meat you buy at the grocery store will still be inspected, but the inspectors might be grumpy because they’re not getting paid. The same can be said for all those “essential” federal workers who will show up every morning knowing that their paycheck will be delayed.
How long? Few see the coming shutdown as being brief. There’s a chance that if House Republicans want to push things to the wall, we might be celebrating Thanksgiving before the government is completely back to work.
The bottom line is that very few Americans are going to be directly affected by the shutdown — except for federal workers, of course. It does no good to wish these workers ill. The vast majority of them are middle-class people, supporting families, going to church on Sundays, and paying their taxes.
How did we get to this point? It was easy; the House Republicans double-crossed the president and forced Speaker Kevin McCarthy to go back on his word.
Biden and McCarthy worked out a deal in June that was supposed to avert this round of back and forth. During those talks, Republicans agreed to suspend the debt limit — the amount of money the federal government can borrow to pay for previously approved spending — in exchange for limiting nondefense spending in 2024 to about $1.6 trillion. Accounting for inflation, that would be a cut from current spending levels.
But far-right members of McCarthy’s conference have demanded a lower spending level and threatened to boot McCarthy from the speakership if he does not comply. Instead of attempting to pass a short-term government funding bill with Democratic votes, McCarthy has tried to extract more concessions by abandoning the deal he struck in May.
“One thing you’re seeing in the Republican majority is we are rewriting the muscle memory of how Congress works,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Tex.), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said Wednesday.
So, deal-breaking is going to become a regular thing? That’s swell. It means that nobody’s word is good for squat, and deals will be that much harder to strike.
I’m sure there are some nihilists who think that a wonderful idea. But I’m wondering if a paralyzed government is really a smart political play.
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