| | | The pain from the government shutdown is about to hit the public
Agencies have been shuttered going on three weeks with no end in sight as the White House and congressional Democrats continue their standoff.
washingtonpost.com
The ongoing government shutdown will collide with the U.S. economy this week, as missed paychecks 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 4,000 workers Friday.
On Sunday, 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 paycheck Wednesday. 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 paychecks 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 U.S. history — shaved $11 billion off the country’s economic output, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“When those paychecks 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 organizations 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 (R-South Dakota) said Friday. “The American people are going to feel a lot more pain and miss a lot more paychecks in the near future.”
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