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News flash for House hard-liners: Shutdowns cost billions [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2023-09-25  

House Republican extremists holding the government hostage want you to believe that they just want to “rein in” government spending and “get our fiscal house in order.” One former legislative counsel for Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul even advises, “A good old government shutdown is exactly what we need right now,” arguing that it will “push the budget closer to balance.”

Then there’s reality: Shutting down the government costs taxpayers billions of dollars in lost fees, revenue, administrative costs to both shut down and start government agencies back up, and back pay for furloughed federal employees. It means small businesses can’t get loans from the federal government for the duration. It will delay people from getting federally backed home loans. And while the Republican-controlled House is fiddling around doing nothing to solve the pending shutdown, it’s also not reauthorizing a bunch of other programs with a direct impact on people’s lives.

According to a 2019 investigation by a Senate subcommittee, “the last three government shutdowns cost taxpayers nearly $4 billion—at least $3.7 billion in back pay to furloughed federal workers, and at least $338 million in other costs associated with the shutdowns, including extra administrative work, lost revenue, and late fees on interest payments.” Everything from entrance fees at national parks to souvenir sales at gift shops shuts down, along with the government.

Some of the largest agencies couldn’t provide estimates on the shutdowns’ cost to their operations, including the Departments of Defense, Agriculture, Justice, and Commerce, and the Environmental Protection Agency. But among the agencies that did report, the figures for lost days of work are eye-popping and indicate “the combined total of furlough days during all three shutdowns was about 14,859,144, representing an estimated 56,938 years of lost productivity for those agency employees.”

Those federal employees also have to keep paying their rent or mortgage and feed their families. Some families who rely on government food assistance will also be harmed, Gayle Carlson, president of the Montana Food Bank Network, told NPR last week. Her group is already preparing for a shutdown based on their experiences of previous shutdowns. “The impact is pretty severe for those federal government employees, but it also impacts thousands and thousands of children in schools with child nutrition programs and young women and mothers with babies and, you know, families who are trying to provide for their households.”

Montana Rep. Matt Rosendale, one of the GOP hard-liners pushing a shutdown over fiscal terms, downplayed the impact. “The government continues on, business as usual,” he said. “When we have these supposed shutdowns, it's more like a slowdown.” It’s true that the government continues on, business as usual, for him and other members of Congress—they’ll still be getting paid. The hundreds of thousands of federal workers who will be furloughed, however, won’t get a paycheck for as long as the shutdown continues.

Compounding the looming shutdown is the fact that the House has been too chaotic to accomplish most of what it was supposed to do by now. For instance, they haven’t passed a farm bill, which means that a bunch of programs—including crop insurance, nutrition programs such as SNAP, rural development funds, and agricultural research and conservation programs—expire at the end of the week. Flood insurance and disaster relief funds are also drying up as the clock ticks down.

Grants and other funding for child care programs expire at the end of the week. The authorization for welfare benefits, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, expires as well. Without congressional action, hospitals around the country that take a disproportionate share of Medicaid patients will see as much as a 54% cut in reimbursements beginning next month.

All of this has an impact not just on millions of lives, but on the economy. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the 35-day shutdown in 2019 lowered the gross domestic product by a total of $11 billion for the first half of that year, and estimated that $3 billion of that would never be recovered.

“I don’t think people who are arguing we should shut down the federal government have thought through all of the unintended consequences,” Bill Hoagland, a former Republican budget director in the Senate, told Bloomberg. “It does affect people definitely.” It’s also possible that they just don’t care.

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