9 Things You Must Know About Shutdown

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iStockphoto/The Fiscal Times
By Eric Pianin,Brianna Ehley,
The Fiscal Times
September 24, 2013
Fiscal Times FREE Newsletter
Plenty of services would disappear. The last government shutdowns were grim times for federal workers, with about 800,000 being furloughed.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention halted disease surveillance. Toxic waste clean-up work at 609 sites was halted. And while zookeepers continued to feed the pandas, the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., was closed to the public. So was the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and 368 national park sites, which resulted in the loss of some seven million visitors.

With non-essential workers on furlough, 200,000 applications for passports went unprocessed. U.S. tourism and airline industries incurred millions of dollars in losses; and more than 20 percent of federal contracts, representing $3.7 billion in spending, were affected adversely.

Social security benefits would keep flowing. Social Security is a mandatory program that would continue during a shutdown, but the entire system would be gunked up. During the 1995 and 1996 shutdowns, claims from 112,000 Social Security applicants went unprocessed, 212,000 Social Security cards were not issued and 800,000 toll-free calls for information went unanswered.

You’d still get mail. The U.S. Postal Service is an independent agency and doesn’t directly receive revenues from the Treasury, so it will continue deliveries through sleet, snow, rain and government shutdowns.

Many federal employees and contractors would work for no pay. According to an OMB advisory memo to agencies last week, employees who stay on the job would not get a paycheck at first. But they would be entitled to retroactive pay once the government is running again. This includes all military personnel.

The situation is much less clear regarding nonessential employees. They would have to come to the office on the first day of a shutdown to secure files, fill out time and attendance forms and “otherwise make preparations to preserve their work,” according to the OMB.

Contractors won’t get paid on time. Federal contractors would likely have to push back project deadlines, because the agencies that hired them wouldn’t be able to issue the necessary paperwork.

Garbage would pile up. Congress would heap one more indignity on the District of Columbia if there’s a shutdown. The city’s trash collectors would be furloughed, along with other D.C. workers whose operating budgets are approved by Congress. That’s going to be a messy situation, since D.C. produces about 500 tons of garbage each week, according to The Washington Post.








   

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