Friday, 8 April 2011, the Congress settled on a budget. President Obama described this budget as the “largest annual spending cut in our history”. He also said that this budget means that the Washington Monument was not closing down on 9 April.
Like many Political Science students I’ve been following the budget issues that threatened to shut down the federal government. And like many Political Science students precisely two things crossed my mind: first, I remembered the episode of West Wing about federal government shutdowns, and second, well, I freaked out a little.
People asked me all week what a shutdown means. What shuts down? Saying “The Federal Government shuts down” is a rather vague and looming notion. It’s hard to wrap your head around what a shut down means, in part because of how complicated it is. Not everything shuts down. Mail still gets delivered, for instance. PBS won’t go off-air either.
There are a couple basic rules of thumb about shutdowns. First, nothing to do with safety closes. And nothing that gets funding from sources other than the budget closes either. So things like the Departments of Defense and Energy stay open; as do things that have funding offsets, like the postal service, potentially even Amtrak can keep running.
Probably the clearest framework for what a “shutdown” means is the one that happened in 1996. President Clinton oversaw the longest shutdown in American history. Tens of thousands of passports and student and work visas piled up every day, the State Department shutting down processing of those documents. Thousands of bankruptcy cases went suspended as well, to say nothing of the closures of 368 national parks services, child support Parent Locator Services, and the Centers for Disease Control.
While law enforcement wasn’t halted, recruitment for law enforcement agencies was. The processing of licenses for firearms, alcohol and tobacco sales, and explosives were stopped as well. And with the Parent Locator program closed, prosecution of delinquent child support cases was halted.
There was also the temporary lay-offs of innumerable federal employees- over a million Americans are employed by the Federal Government. While not all of those employees would be sent home, a large portion of them would, since the places they work would be closed.
There was good news, if that could be the word for it. Not everything closes in a shutdown. Entitlements like Medicare and Social Security continued, as did emergency management and the financial operations of the Treasury.
Well, Social Security only sort of works in a shutdown. 15 February, President Obama remarked that people would not receive Social Security checks in the event of a shutdown. But like I mentioned above, entitlements aren’t affected by a shutdown. So is the President wrong? Not exactly. Checks did get sent out in the 1996 shutdown, however the people who actually mail them get sent home. So would Social Security stop? That’s a good question. Thankfully, one we don’t have to answer.
Crisis was averted. As tends to happen, at the eleventh hour everyone agreed that staying open was more important than political posturing. President Obama spoke about sacrifices on both sides, hard cuts to swallow, and a rough road ahead. But we’re heading down that road. He touted keeping social issues out of the budget. The President said quite a lot of things.
But we have a budget. That was the most important thing President Obama said. Because even with just a cursory understanding of shutdowns, people know we ought to avoid them.
Congressional Research Service: http://images.businessweek.com/extras/11/02/shutdown_RL34680.pdf