Here are the Staggering Costs of Shutdown Brinksmanship

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/congress-government-shutdown-costs-daca-trump/

Here are the Staggering Costs of Shutdown Brinksmanship
Just the threat of closing down the government is colossally expensive.

Andy Kroll
Jan. 19, 2018 10:48 AM


Once again, the hours are counting down to a government shutdown.

For close to a decade, the federal government has functioned more or less continuously under such a threat. In 2011, a far-right contingent of Republicans in Congress, swept into office by the tea party wave, first started wielding the possibility of a shutdown to advance its agenda of slashing federal spending and shrinking the size of the government. Today, both parties use the threat of a shutdown as leverage to enact their preferred policies.

The possibility of a shutdown looms because our divided Congress can’t pass an annual budget on time or even at all. Instead, it funds the federal government in short, incremental bursts, passing what are known as continuing resolutions to keep the government operating for weeks or months at a time. In recent years, as the latest continuing resolution neared its expiration date, another round of brinksmanship began, with the clock ticking until funding ran out.

Congressional Republicans last followed through on such a threat in October 2013, forcing a partial shutdown that lasted 16 days. Some 800,000 federal employees were furloughed. A million more employees suffered delays in receiving their paychecks. Credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s said the shutdown sucked $24 billion out of the economy.

That’s the situation right now: Democrats and Republicans are locked in negotiations over funding for President Donald Trump’s border wall and securing a deal on the legal status of the so-called Dreamers—undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children—before the government runs out of money at midnight on Friday. The House passed a bill on Thursday that would fund the government through February 16, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t appear to have the votes needed to send the measure to the president’s desk.

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The potential of a government shutdown may be a giant waste of taxpayer money, but Congress appears to show little interest in changing that. On December 22, after yet another round of full-scale preparations by agencies bracing for a shutdown, lawmakers passed yet another continuing resolution to keep the government open for several weeks. That measure contained enough money to fund the government through this Friday. If the Senate does pass its own continuing resolution, the countdown clock to bureaucratic armageddon begins again.

Philip Joyce, the University of Maryland professor, says it is possible that small-government conservatives see shutdown threats and the resulting dysfunction as a way to achieve their ultimate aim of whittling down the size and scope of government. But he argues that the debate over the role of government should be separate from the simple act of smoothly funding it. “It’s one thing to say that you want to cut the EPA’s budget by 30 percent,” Joyce says. “It’s another thing to make the EPA ineffective by having it limp along from one continuing resolution to another and leaving positions unfilled and not hiring people. When you do that, there’s an insidious impact on the effectiveness of government.”