The Hidden Cost of a Government Shutdown
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Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, has promoted this narrative the loudest. “About 83% of the government stays open in a shutdown,” he said back in April 2017. “Social Security checks go out; the military still exists. The FBI still chases bad guys. I think the consequences of a shutdown have been blown out of proportion.” He returned to the theme last January, just before a three-day government shutdown, first telling the press he wouldn’t “weaponize” the crisis or “try and hurt people, especially people who happen to work for this federal government,” and later telling Sean Hannity he thought presiding over a shutdown was “kind of cool.”
This is deeply misleading. To present a shutdown as an innocent tactic for resolving gridlock, officials like Mr. Mulvaney must pretend the federal workforce is smaller than it really is. The federal government currently relies on about 2.1 million civil servants, 1.2 million grantees and the equivalent of four million full-time contractors to deliver goods and services on the public’s behalf. Some of these employees work for contract firms that build weapons systems; others work for universities and research labs, and still others work for the small businesses that staff government back offices. I call it the “government-industrial complex.” These employees are not listed in the annual head counts of full-time federal personnel, but their jobs are essential to faithfully executing the law.
Add in another 500,000 Postal Service employees, 1.3 million active-duty military personnel, and the 4.5 million Americans whose jobs depend on household spending of the government-industrial complex’s members, and there are about 13.5 million Americans who might be wondering whether they should conserve cash in case the shutdown becomes protracted. Then imagine the economic chaos that causes in the manufacturing sector, which employs similar numbers of Americans, and in retail, which employs even more.
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Not mentioning the indirect workforce reveals just how much the administration wants to minimize the effect of an indefinite shutdown in the eyes of the public. The administration must also be wondering how to reassure contractors, universities and nonprofits. Perhaps it has decided it’s better to deny the existence of this workforce when warning that the shutdown could continue into next year than give employers a reason to suspend their hiring plans until Washington resolves the impasse.
More..
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hidden-cost-of-a-government-shutdown-11545955599 (paid subscription)
Mr. Light is a professor of public service at New York University and author of “The Government-Industrial Complex.”
