When a trash can gets full and
there’s a government shutdown, people don’t stop throwing stuff on top of it. But I did manage to pick up a couple
truckloads of trash before I was told: “Don’t do it anymore.” People were not even able to volunteer
during the government shutdown. "Stop the shutdown,
stop the shutdown!" The US is the only country in the world where
the government can actually shut down. And the threat looms nearly every year. "Seven days until shut down—" "Four days—" "T-minus six days—" "Five days—" "Government shutdown at midnight tonight." I just feel my gut in my
chest - like, ugh, not again. So, why does the US even shut down? And what happens when it does? “You travel 3,500 miles to America
and find that they shut down!” Every government in the world
has to do the same thing: decide how to spend the country’s money. In the US, they do that by passing spending bills, called appropriations bills, that give these federal agencies their budgets. It happens every year — or every fiscal year. Japan is April 1st. In Kenya, it's July 1st. In the US, it’s October 1st. And if the government misses that deadline... The budget wasn't passed. We have no money. And then, "Oh, you have to come to work anyway." Just not getting paid. We did get back pay, but, still,
you have to wait for that. The saddest thing I’ve ever seen was seeing
all these hard working people in a line for their food bank. It’s the conversation at the
dinner table every single night. “Well, Dad, do you know when
you’re gonna get paid again?" No. I don’t. It’s the way the US government
was set up. Kind of. The answer to why we have government
shutdowns actually starts in the Constitution. “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but
in consequence of appropriations made by law.” And so what that really means is that before any federal money
can be spent, there has to be an actual appropriations law allowing it. But that can be interpreted in different ways and it has changed over time. Back in the 1800’s there were no shutdowns. But there were other problems. Agencies would routinely
blow through their budgets then keep spending and would come back to Congress and ask for more. So Congress passed the Antideficiency Act. It tells federal officials that they really,
really can't spend money without an appropriation. But that didn’t stop the government from missing
their deadline, and creating long gaps in funding. As recently as the 1970s, there were
plenty of these funding gaps. And yet... The agency sort of pretty much just kept going. It couldn't possibly be that
Congress wanted them to shut down if there was no budget bill passed on time, right? But what happened was in the early 1980s, the attorney general issued two opinions
that tightened up this interpretation. The opinions basically said no seriously, unless Congress
has passed an appropriations bill agencies can’t spend any money. Including to employ the
services of their employees. Even though there technically is
money, we have no access to it. And since then, the US has
shutdown-shutdown many times. 1996 was the first big one, for three weeks. And 2019 was the longest in history, so far. I actually got to work and they was like, “We’re all furloughed.
They shut the building down.” I was like, “Oh, the doors
are not opening right now?” They were like, “No.
It's shut down completely.” I was like, “What is a furlough?
What’s going on?” I couldn’t work.
I couldn’t go in. We weren’t even allowed to check email. So I ended up picking up side jobs
trying to make ends-meet. These are all the agencies
of the federal government. Here are the ones that actually shutdown in 1996. And in 2019. Shutdowns don't have to be
of the whole government. So it might just be that one set
of agencies didn't get funded. Congress couldn't reach agreement
with each other and with the president on whether that set of agencies would get funded. But the rest of the government
was funded perfectly well. In 2019, around 800,000 federal employees
didn’t get a paycheck for 35 days. But more than half of them
still had to go into work. Because there are some jobs
that the Attorney General said are exempt from stopping completely, what we call “essential” employees. So while the Department of
Transportation was shut down, air traffic controllers still had to work. I don’t show up with a headset
and just do that job by myself. All the other aviation safety professionals
that assist us and help us on a daily basis are now taken away. Homeland Security shut down but
TSA workers still had to show up. Without pay. We’re one of the lowest paid agencies. Not receiving a check every two weeks was hard. People on the floor were
smiling and greeting everyone, but behind closed doors in the break
room we had people breaking down. National Parks lost millions in entry fees. Wildfire mitigation projects were delayed. Immigration court hearings — backlogged. And, there were thousands of contractors
that work with all of these agencies who were also affected. If you were just working on
a contract with a company, you did not get back pay.
At all. My son has chronic asthma —
couldn’t afford his medicine. I felt like I was... I was disappointed in them
and it wasn’t even my fault. And a shutdown isn’t just
centralized in Washington, DC. Only 15 percent of all federal
employees live in that area. Which means the economic-impact is country-wide. Shutting down not only
affects the federal workers. If people aren’t getting paid,
they’re not going out to eat. There is a severe economic impact
to something like that, especially in a town like Huntsville. Overall, the US economy lost $11 billion
during the 2019 shutdown. Some of that was regained when
employees received their back pay, but the damage was done. And the thing is, this doesn't have to happen. The legal framework explains why we end up
having to have shutdowns as a matter of law. But why we have shutdowns
truly is a matter of politics, which is that the more polarized the parties
are and the more divided our government is, the harder time Congress and the president
have working out a budget agreement. And having divisive politics
isn’t uniquely American. In Belgium, there have been times
where the politics were so bad, they just didn’t have a government. We didn’t really notice any difference. Our daily lives didn’t really change much. I don’t think the government
could really like — stop. Most countries couldn’t. In nearly every other country, if the government were to fail
to pass a budget by the deadline, agencies would just continue
working with last year’s budget. There’s a push to do that in the US, too. Just have an automatic, temporary appropriations
bill pass when the deadline is missed. The opposing argument to
that is "Whoa, whoa, whoa." "This is the one time we have every year to reset and to kind of work things out and
so where would the incentive go?" Congress has passed fewer
and fewer laws each year. Passing these appropriations bills has become the one time they’re kind of
forced to agree on something. And as the political ideology of each
Congress grows further apart each year, the likelihood of them agreeing
on time kind of goes down. So every fall... "Washington’s version of groundhog day." "Another government shutdown looms." We are caught as pawns - Pawns in an ultimate game as a federal employee
in a conversation that has nothing to do with us. We’re not going to work
increasing the profit of a CEO. We’re doing public services and now I’m
not going to get a paycheck? That’s crazy.
