Recently, the risk of government shutdown cast a large and dangerous shadow over the roughly 2 million people working for the federal government of the United States.
A shutdown is when Congress is unable to renew the budget for the federal government, resulting in the ceasing of all non-essential federal activities. This causes various jobs to not be paid; direct work in the government obviously comes to mind, but it extends deeper. Postal workers, teachers at military academies, government contractors, some FDA funded food bank employees, and even more jobs we don’t think about as often as being government jobs would all be affected. The economy takes a massive blow, even if the shutdown is only for weeks or even days. It is in light of this knowledge that the threat of a government shutdown as a political tactic becomes a terrifying thought.
To be perfectly clear, recent events are not the first time a government shutdown has been used as a means to a political end. According to a 2014 article in ABC news, “Congress failed to come to an agreement on a budget after Republican lawmakers began pushing to defund Obamacare. Not surprisingly, Senate Democrats and the Obama administration rejected the proposals and the resulting impasse led to the partial shutdown that began in early October 2013.” However, the concept of this in the first place is a thought that is particularly scary, especially for the implications it has regarding the general public. As Congress came within days of a shutdown over Republican demands for spending cuts, it exposed just how dangerous this can be.
Putting over 2 million American citizens essentially out of a job, for even a short amount of time, is disastrous. Even aside from not getting paid, other effects by extension take place. National parks and monuments are closed and aren’t maintained when they aren’t staffed by paid employees; this was on full display during the 2013 shutdown, when the Lincoln Memorial was not maintained and a citizen went around collecting trash and mowing the lawn on his own free time. And that is all the tip of the iceberg; as a shutdown extends, it can make it very hard for some government workers to make ends meet.
Representatives in Congress are not the ones taking a heavy blow from a shutdown, and yet they are allowed to play with the possibility as if sacrificing a piece in a game of chess. The system allows for putting 2 million people out of work to be used as a tool to push a political agenda. It doesn’t matter which side it is, it’s a matter of the power existing in the first place. It just shows that if a political party has something they want, they have the power– and sometimes, the will– to threaten to burn down the economy to reach that goal.
