Government Shutdown 2018: What a federal government shutdown actually means

Congress is barreling toward a government shutdown deadline.

The House and Senate have until midnight on Friday, January 19 to pass a spending bill or the federal government will run out of money and close its doors.

Despite controlling every lever of government, Republicans are somehow faced with the possibility that they can’t get the votes together to keep the government open. The shutdown could happen either because there aren’t 218 Republicans in the House and 50 in the Senate who can agree on a deal to fund the government, extend the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and offer relief for unauthorized immigrants who came as children, or because Democrats use their filibuster power in the Senate to block a funding bill they find unacceptable.

It’s been over four years since the last government shutdown, but after copious experience with shutdowns, especially during the protracted budget standoffs of the Clinton and Obama presidencies, we have a good sense of what will happen to the federal government if another occurs.

If Congress can’t get it together to pass some kind of appropriations bill before the deadline, the government shuts down, and lots of “nonessential” government activities suddenly cease.

It’s not unusual for Congress to go to the brink of shutdown; it happened as recently as this past fall, when President Trump threatened a shutdown in a bid to get funding for a border wall.

The government has officially shut down 18 times since the modern process that Congress uses to pass budget and spending bills took effect in 1976. The first six of those didn’t actually affect the functioning of government at all. It wasn’t until a set of opinions issued by Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti in 1980 and ’81 that the government started treating “spending gaps” — periods when Congress has failed to allocate funds for the ongoing functions of government — as necessitating the full or partial shutdown of government agencies.

But from the Reagan years onward, any period in which Congress failed to pass funding measures has meant that major chunks of the government stop operating. Which parts depends from shutdown to shutdown, but it generally excludes essential services without which the economy would grind to a halt and people would die.

During shutdowns, federal employees are divided into “essential” and “nonessential” groups (the name was changed to “excepted” and “non-excepted” in 1995 to avoid hurting people’s feelings). Nonessential personnel receive furloughs: They’re off work until the shutdown is resolved and stop receiving paychecks. In the October 2013 shutdown, about 850,000 federal workers received furloughs, or about 40 percent of all federal nonmilitary employees. After shutdowns, furloughed workers almost always receive retroactive payments covering their salaries during the shutdown. Essential workers also see their pay withheld — but they have to work anyway.

The military, air traffic control, federal prisons, and Social Security and other benefit payments generally keep functioning as normal during shutdowns. But many other government functions are curtailed. In the 2013 shutdown, the effects of the furloughs and other shutdowns in government activity included:

In total, the Office on Management and Budget estimated that the shutdown cut GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2013 by 0.2 to 0.6 points, and resulted in 120,000 fewer jobs.

So while shutdowns don’t result in seniors going without their retirement checks, or the military closing up shop, or airplanes crashing into each other in the sky, they do cause massive disruption in the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers and their families, and grind a lot of government agencies to a halt.

There are some things Congress can do to avoid an embarrassing outcome.

It could 1) pass the appropriations bills, likely in an omnibus, which just crams together 11 appropriations bills into one spending package; 2) pass a “continuing resolution,” or CR, which would fund the government at its current levels, basically buying more time to negotiate the actual appropriations bills (this is what Congress did in December 2016, pushing the deadline to April 28); or 3) pass a “CRomnibus,” which is combination of the two, extending the deadline on certain more contentious appropriations — like for the Department of Homeland Security — in addition to passing a spending bill on the rest.

There seems to be bipartisan support to pass Frelinghuysen’s CR, which also includes funding for former miners’ health care and benefits by continuing funding for the Health Benefits for Miners Act.

But even with a one week extension, and Republicans in control of the House, Senate, and White House, passing this spending bill won’t be easy for the 115th Congress. Unlike President Trump’s Cabinet (and now Supreme Court) nominations, which only needed a simple majority of 51 votes, Republican senators will need 60 votes to end debate on the appropriations bill and get it passed — which means they need to get their party in line plus eight Democrats on their side.

So far, this has looked to mean that Democrats will either get their way on funding or the government will shut down.

Congress is on a tight schedule. It has just a few days with both chambers in session to strike a spending deal — or agree they need more time to strike a deal.

For now, it looks like the government will buy itself some time. And while that’s possibly necessary to avoid shutdown, delaying the shutdown deadline makes the Republican Party’s already full calendar even fuller, distracting lawmakers from tax reform and health care.

As with all bills, the final say is with President Trump. He has to decide whether or not he will sign anything short of his campaign demands. Members of his administration have indicated the White House doesn’t want a shutdown either, but it hasn’t stopped them from making a final push.

The White House seems more interested in a fight than congressional Republicans do. Over recess, the administration took a harder line on the shutdown deadline, saying funding for the wall is a “must,” and Trump tweeted that Obamacare is in “serious trouble.” The president was seemingly hinting at a deal that Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney put on the table: an exchange of $1 for the insurance subsidy payments under Obamacare for every $1 given to the border wall. The offer hasn’t swayed Senate Democrats. The White House has asked for supplemental budget to begin construction on the border wall between the US and Mexico. Schumer rejected the deal.

A Democratic aide said Mulvaney told Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) that the White House could stop funding Obamacare’s subsidies as soon as next month, further escalating tensions over the omnibus bill only days before the April 28 deadline. The White House rolled back its threat within a day.

On Thursday April 27, President Donald Trump aired Congress’s negotiations over Twitter, claiming the Democrats are fighting for Obamacare subsidies for Puerto Rico.

On the other hand, the White House seems to have softened its demands for the wall. Most recently, flipping his script, Trump said funding for the wall could wait until September.

Many of Trump’s campaign promises are at stake in this fight — and Democrats have made it clear they don’t want to concede on any of them.

If Republicans didn’t need Democrats to pass a bill, they would want to hike up defense spending, grant Trump’s border wall supplemental budget, defund Planned Parenthood (although Speaker Ryan has said that belongs in the health care debate), and cut off subsidies to insurance companies core to Obamacare’s functionality.

But Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer has said none of this is going to happen.

Senate and House Democrats have already warned Republicans that any attempt to pass funding for the border wall or other “poison pills” like defunding Planned Parenthood in the 2017 appropriations bill would be met with unified Democratic resistance — which would result in a shutdown.

This puts Republicans in a difficult spot.

They will either have to make peace with a shutdown or make concessions to Democrats. It looks as though they’re leaning toward the latter, which would result in an omnibus bill that’s pretty friendly to Democrats.

There are some areas of possible agreement, like increases in defense funding and a watered-down compromise on border security, possibly to fund more technology — an area that has more bipartisan support.

It will be near impossible for Republican leadership to sell these concessions to the entirety of its conference — especially once conservatives realize just how much their party has to concede. The irony there is that the more Republican leadership realizes it will lose conservative votes in its own party, the more it will have to rely on Democrats to avoid a shutdown.

Huffington Post’s Matt Fuller put it best: “Conservatives inside and outside Congress may soon rightfully ask: How is this deal any different than a bill Republicans would get if Hillary Clinton were president and Democrats controlled Congress?”

According to Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-NY), border wall funding is a nonissue in negotiations: It’s not going to happen. But there are still a number of open items on the table, the biggest of which appears to be funding Obamacare’s subsidies.

As it stands now, it will be a difficult ask for Republicans to give in to Democratic demand to fund cost-sharing reductions — which help make copays and deductibles cheaper for people who have insurance through Obamacare — in the appropriations bill.

“It’s going to be very, very difficult to get Republicans to vote for billions of dollars to fund failing exchanges,” a GOP aide said about the Obamacare subsidies. The aide added that funding Obamacare will likely be more of a sticking point with wider Republican support than funding a border wall. “Not every person campaigned on building a border wall, but every person campaigned on repealing Obamacare.”

Some Republican House leaders seem less willing to go to the mat over Obamacare.

“I don’t think anybody wants to disrupt the markets more than they already are,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee responsible for health spending, told the New York Times. “It’s a very unstable market.”

Two days before the April 28 spending deadline, Speaker Ryan said he would not stand for funding Obamacare subsidies in the appropriations bill. But Senate and House Democrats remain adamant that CSR language needs to be included.

It looks like Congress will have an extra week to come to a compromise. If they don’t, however, they will have a government shutdown on their watch.