WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of intelligence agency employees would be furloughed even as tension over North Korea’s nuclear program remains…
WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of intelligence agency employees would be furloughed even as tension over North Korea’s nuclear program remains high. Important biomedical and public health research would be interrupted and possibly damaged. Military veterans would watch helplessly as the processing of their disability claims came to a halt.
Although the government won’t actually close if Congress can’t pass a spending bill by Friday at midnight, there’s plenty that won’t get done should hundreds of thousands of federal employees be barred from working until dysfunctional Washington agrees on a plan.
J. David Cox, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said shutdowns can have dramatic impacts as jobs are left unattended. The longer a shutdown lasts, he said, the worse it gets.
“Day one, the world doesn’t fall apart,” Cox said. But “things start to crumble” over time, he said, as Americans begin to realize how reliant they are on the government.
Partial shutdowns can be expensive, too. Five years ago, when swaths of the federal government were shuttered for just over two weeks, 850,000 employees were furloughed, which cost the government 6.6 million days of work and more than $2.5 billion in lost productivity and pay and benefits for employees.
In the case of a shutdown, just under half of the 2 million civilian federal workers would be forced off the job if the Trump administration sticks to the rules followed by previous Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But U. S. troops will stay at their posts and mail will get delivered as about 500,000 Postal Service employees and 1.3 million uniformed military personnel are exempt from being furloughed.
A lengthy shutdown could cause lingering problems for the Internal Revenue Service, which is preparing for the start of the tax filing season while also still ingesting the sweeping changes made by the new GOP tax law.
It’s “too early to tell” whether a shutdown would affect the government’s implementation of the massive new tax law enacted last month, White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said in an interview Wednesday on Fox Business Network’s “Varney & Co.” He said his agency hasn’t yet determined whether the IRS employees developing new tax forms to conform with the law are deemed essential, meaning they would still report to work during a shutdown.
But Marcus Owens, who for 10 years headed the IRS division dealing with charities and political organizations, said those employees traditionally are considered non-essential.
