Shutdown Risks Government Services For Veterans, Families

Republican Representative Mike Bost of Illinois said the shutdown won't impact medical care for veterans but other Department of Veterans Affairs programs will be in jeopardy the longer the impasse drags on.

he federal government shutdown threatens to exacerbate an economic slowdown in the DC metropolitan area, which is already reeling from months of Trump administration cuts.

As the shutdown nears the one-week mark, Republican and Democratic lawmakers remain in a stalemate over health care subsidies in a plan to fund the government. An estimated 750,000 federal workers have been temporarily placed on an unpaid leave of absence, and the Trump administration is considering not paying them back when the government reopens. The White House has also threatened to outright fire thousands of workers.

The temporary loss of paychecks and threats of new job cuts are adding to the woes for the region of more than 6 million people around Washington, DC, that includes parts of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. The unemployment rate in the metropolitan area has already jumped to the highest in four years and is expected to continue to rise as federal employees who accepted deferred resignation offers officially rolled off payrolls last week.

Even a brief shutdown could have severe consequences if the Trump administration follows through with threats to suspend backpay for furloughed workers.

“It would greatly exacerbate the negative impacts with broader spillover effects,” including a drop in retail and hospitality spending as people miss rent and mortgage payments, said Terry Clower, a public policy professor and director of George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis.

While federal jobs are distributed throughout the US, the concentration of federal functions and supporting businesses has left the nation’s capital particularly vulnerable. The unemployment rates for DC, Virginia and Maryland have climbed faster than nearly every other state this year. And investment in the region has declined this year as the number of for-sale homes has surged.

Senate Republicans pushed back on a White House assertion that some federal workers may not receive back pay when the government shutdown ends, a move sure to launch more lawsuits against the Trump administration.

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) said Congress settled the issue when it enacted a law (Public Law 116-1) requiring that all federal employees receive back pay after government shutdowns end. That conflicts with a new stance by President Donald Trump’s administration, which has argued the back pay isn’t automatic for workers who are furloughed.

“Congress settled that issue in the 2019 law,” Collins told reporters Tuesday.

Denying federal workers back pay after the shutdown will prompt lawsuits from public sector unions and employees, employment attorneys predicted. It’s already rankled Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill, who see legal and political weaknesses in the White House’s stance.

“The bottom line is it shouldn’t be up to the president,” said Zachary Price, a University of California-San Francisco law professor who was a Justice Department lawyer during the Obama administration.

If Congress refuses to appropriate funds for back pay, workers may be able to see compensation through the US Court of Federal Claims, which resolves monetary claims against the government, Price said.

Collins proposed “a backup” measure, writing into any government-funding bill a provision “that says any obligations that were incurred during the shutdown are authorized to be paid.” That kind of provision was common in past shutdowns, when back pay wasn’t legally automatic. But it is not in the House-passed continuing resolution that has fallen five votes short of the 60 votes necessary in the Senate.

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