More than 700,000 federal employees are going without pay as the government shutdown moves into its fourth week. A group of 70,000 law enforcement officers is one of the exceptions.
Customs and Border Protection border patrol agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation officers, Secret Service Special Agents, and Transportation Security Administration air marshals will continue to be paid during the ongoing shutdown, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed to Fortune.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem outlined on social media last week these personnel will receive “super checks” by Wednesday covering their next pay period, as well as lost wages from the first few days of the shutdown, and applicable overtime pay.
Not all essential workers have been so fortunate. Among the hundreds of thousands of government employees not being paid are air traffic controllers, who have been deemed necessary employees. Many are working 60 hours, six days a week, and some are taking on second “gig jobs,” such as serving at restaurants or driving for Uber or DoorDash, according to Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.
“To think that somehow we can live with, ‘You’ll get paid eventually,’ that doesn’t pay the creditors, that doesn’t pay the mortgage, that doesn’t pay gas, that doesn’t pay the food bill,” Daniels told Fortune earlier this week. “No one takes IOUs, and the air traffic controllers are having to feel that pressure as well.”
The decisions of who gets paid and who doesn’t during government shutdowns depends on department personnel sorting employees into respective groups of essential and non-essential, as well as appropriations for salaries that may or may not be impacted by the lapsed Congressional budget.
But this employee selection process is completely arbitrary and subjective, highlighting a failure of government shutdowns, which are ultimately more expensive than keeping the government operating, according to Linda Bilmes, a public finance expert and senior lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. EY-Parthenon chief economist Gregory Daco estimated for each week the government is shut down, it would translate to a $7 billion economic hit and a 0.1% reduction in U.S. GDP growth, a result, in part, of delayed procurement of goods and a drag on demand.
“There is this overarching dysfunction of the entire process,” Bilmes told Fortune. “Every time you get into one of these situations—which has been on average four times a year for the last four to five years—there is an arbitrariness in who ends up being paid for their work, who ends up working, who ends up being furloughed.”
“The arbitrariness is almost inherent in this dysfunction—a feature as well as being a bug,” she added.
A ‘dysfunctional’ system
There have been 20 government “funding gaps” in the last 50 years, following a 1974 Congressional budget reform law in response to former President Richard Nixon’s impoundment attempts on funds Congress had already allocated. While the president had significant control over the budget for the better part of the 20th century, the 1974 reform put more power in Congress’ hands.
As a result of a series of fiscal and appropriations committees overseeing government budgets, the process of allocating and approving funds is convoluted, Bilmes said. For example, the Department of Veterans Affairs has a two-year budget, meaning their funding does not lapse when Congress fails to pass an appropriations bill. The Patent and Trademark Office, conversely, is not funded through Congressionally appropriated money, but rather through patent fees, and likewise do not have employee pay impacted by the shutdown.
But even furloughing employees during a shutdown or giving them temporarily unpaid leave can end up costing more than just continuing to pay them, Bilmes noted. Government contractors are typically furloughed, but unlike many other federal workers, they are not guaranteed—and in many cases, not paid—backpay. These contractors are aware of a potential disruption in income because of the frequency of shutdowns and, as a result, pad their contracts.
Bilmes posited that in order to resolve the arbitrary payment disparities during shutdowns, there should be automatic resolutions, creating an automatic extension of the previous budget. This, however, would not be ideal because it could make less urgent conversations about planning, strategy, and addressing long-term problems that accompany new budget discussions, she said. An alternative would be to have the whole government run on a two-year budget to avoid the quarterly stop-and-go that has become the current precedent.
Otherwise, the process does not serve the American public, Bilmes conceded.
“In my view,” she said, “it’s like spending money on shooting ourselves in the foot and deciding which foot we want to shoot first.”
