What, exactly, is going on here? Why is the government shutting down, because they can’t pass a budget? How is it that the republicans are shifting the blame here?
Here is an attempt at a factual answer, from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which as an outside news agency, has no dog in the fight:
U.S. government shutdown: What to expect if it happens
As for the “Why?”, I doubt that you can get a factual answer while this thread is in GQ, since it’s all political.
In the general case of the government shutting down (it’s happened 37 times since 1977):
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The government must have a budget to operate - no budget, no money may be spent.
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If there is a not a budget, non-essential (for some definition of non-essential) agencies must stop working immediately.
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If there is not a budget, essential (again, for some definition of essential) must keep working without pay. They will get backpay when a budget does get passed. The military is the most obvious example of this.
As far as the current ‘crisis’, The Republicans are refusing to pass a budget that contains funding for Obamacare, the Democrats are refusing to pass a budget that doesn’t include the funding for Obamacare, thus the Oct 1 deadline (beginning of the fiscal year) is approaching, and if the impasse is not broken, non-essential personally stop working.
My best attempt at a GQ answer:
The government cannot spend any money unless the expenditure is allowed by law.
Under normal circumstances, the Congress passes a yearly budget, which allocates money to various programs; the President signs that into law, and the government expends money as that budget authorizes.
The last budget authorizes money to be spent through today, September 30th.
If no budget is passed, the law sharply limits money the government can spend – broadly speaking, it can continue to spend money to protect life and property, to operate the military, and to respond to emergencies.
Because budgets typically involve a great deal of wrangling and compromise, it’s become common to not have an agreement in Congress when October 1st rolls around. So to keep the government running, Congress has more or less routinely passed “Continuing Resolutions,” in prior years. The Continuing Resolution essentially says, “We’ll keep every running for one more month, with every single line item funded at exactly 1/12 of its value from the prior year.” In other words, continue everything for a month, neither raising no lowering any amounts from the last approved budget. This gives them another month to negotiate the new budget.
This year, in addition to the usual “Continuing Resolution” language, the House’s CR included a requirement that no money at all be spent on the Affordable Healthcare Act (“Obamacare.”) Because the constitution demands it, by the way, all spending bills must originate in the House.
The Senate amended the House’s language to remove the part defunding Obamacare. The House rejected that bill, and passed a new CR, this time with the added provision that Obamacare be delayed one year, and that the portion of Obamacare that taxes medical equipment be deleted. That version is awaiting Senate action.
It is widely expected that the Senate will reject it. And even if the Senate does pass it, it’s widely assumed that President Obama will veto it.
The Republicans argue that they have offered a compromise, and the Democrats are causing the shutdown by refusing their “delay one year” compromise.
The Democrats argue that the bill is already a law, and the way to stop it is properly done by ordinary repeal, rather than holding the rest of the country’s operating budget hostage to one program.
More analysis of those latter positions is obviously GD territory, but hopefully the above summary is factual enough for GQ.
If federal employees at not paid, but not fired as well I take it they can’t apply for employment insurance?
I don’t believe they can. As in, they simply are not getting paid for however long it takes for Congress to work out it’s problems.
For the military, this is a problem but it’s mitigated by the fact that the military will provide housing and food for the average grunt (not that it’s a good situation still, and I have no idea what happens to off-base housing).
For the civilians who just have a desk job, it blows. Hope you weren’t living paycheck-to-paycheck…
I will just add that it has become very commonplace for Congress to pass short-term appropriations bills to avoid government shutdown to buy time to complete overall budget negotiations. Between the government shutdowns in 1995-1996, there have been several dozen short term appropriations bills passed to continue government operations at the beginning of each fiscal year. (These bills are also known as continuing resolutions, or CRs.) The reason these bills are commonplace is that they typically don’t have controversial provisions attached to them (aka, a “clean” CR).
In fact, since Republicans took the majority in the House of Representatives, the House has approved 9 “clean” CRs in 2011 and 2012 to continue government operations for durations ranging from a few months to as short as a day or two.
http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/furlough-guidance/guidance-for-shutdown-furloughs.pdf
More info here: Furlough Guidance
I am curious. The impasse has been well reported here in the UK, but the expectation seems to be that some compromise will be reached at the 11th hour.
Are Americans sitting on the edge of their seats, or will they go to bed expecting to see some cobbled solution on the morning news.
Like post #3 stated (it’s happened 37 times in the past 36 years) it gets to be old hat. I won’t be losing any sleep over it.
The stock market may take a dip but it will rebound once it’s over.
I know very few people who are actually employed by the federal government, and we all plan to go to bed expecting to see some cobbled solution on the morning news. If not tomorrow morning, then probably the day after. No one really thinks that the United States Of America will actually close up shop for more than a few weeks.
But yes, it could happen, and THAT is the scary part.
and you can bet that the folks who ARE employed by the Feds, AND are living paycheck-to-paycheck, are plenty scared, past reprieves or no.
It’s happened before, it’ll happen again. We’ll get over it.
In my opinion, there is zero chance of a last-minute agreement. Absolutely zero.
We just witnessed one senator stage a 21-hour filibuster against a motion to debate a budget bill – which he then voted in favor of. It only takes one senator to tie the Senate in knots for the better part of a week with cloture motions and other wastes of time. There’s just no chance whatsoever that anything can happen at 11:59 tonight.
I had previously thought that the shutdown would last several days. Now I’m thinking it will last a couple weeks.
Since the basic factual elements to the OP have been pretty well addressed, and because this is otherwise a political question, let’s move this over to GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
“Non-essential” personnel are essentially laid off, aren’t they? You can collect unemployment in that case. Being laid off is not the same thing as getting fired, and you can collect unemployment when you are laid off.
What I’m wondering about is the “essential” personnel. Forcing them to work, without remuneration, would be a violation of the 13th amendment, would it not?
Essential staff will be paid.
Duckster’s links seem to indicate I was wrong about the inability to apply for unemployment. Although, I thought unemployment insurance was also paid out by the feds, so apparently I should stop talking.
As far essential personnel, the way the feds get around the 13th is that those workers must be paid, but they don’t get paid until AFTER the budget is passed.
Nobody is forced to work in violation of the 13th amendment.
Government staff may be required to work without pay until the budget is eventually passed; if they refuse, they lose their jobs. That’s not a violation of the 13th amendment.
That leads me to another question. Couldn’t those employees file and win a class-action lawsuit against the government if they are not paid on schedule?
Let’s say employee A has such a contract, and has a contract with service-provider X where X will automatically debit A’s checking account on a certain day of the month. A hasn’t been paid on schedule, so the money is not there when X debits his account, resulting in an overdraft at the bank. If X halts the automatic debit, his rate for X’s service is increased. Either way, A has suffered some loss that he would not have otherwise incurred had he been paid on time. Multiply that by thousands of A’s, and wouldn’t you have a pretty strong case for a class-action breach of contract suit?
There is an added wrinkle to federal employees collecting unemployment. Put aside your pragmatic and reasonable mind for this and apply your Tea-Party-Fed-Employees-Are-Terrible mind.
When a federal employee is furloughed, they are furnished by their HR department two documents:
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[li] SF-8 - Notice to Federal Employee About Unemployment Insurance[/li][li] SF-50 - Notice of Personnel Action[/li][/ul]
The former is a boilerplate document. You can even find it on the OPM web site. However, the latter is a specific document detailing your furlough. The problem is many (most?) SF-50s are issued down the road, meaning it takes time to send them out, weeks sometimes months later.
For a federal employee to claim unemployment, their state agency often initially requires the SF-8 and SF-50 to process the claim. If you cannot produce them (especially the SF-50) your claim cannot be processed. And if the fed employee’s HR department is also furloughed, they are not able to issue SF-50s in a timely manner, if at all. You can see where this is going. Add insult to injury many states require those who are unemployed to actively seek work during unemployment. Various ethics/conduct regulations/laws prohibit outside work of federal employees, even during a furlough, although each agency may have specific regs on this.
So it’s conceivable for furloughed federal employees to be furloughed and denied the apply for, let alone, collect unemployment, and unable to look for any work at all. More so now with Tea Party nut jobs willing to snitch on a furloughed federal employee just trying to stay above water. If the recent nationwide poll (no cite) that says 40 percent of wage earners live from paycheck to paycheck, one can infer a sizable portion of federal employees are in the same boat.