It looks like we can breathe a sigh of relief. Last night, Senate leaders struck a deal that is likely to avert a government shutdown. But some in the chamber aren’t so impressed. As one fed-up senator told me last week, the United States has a lot of problems and yet success in today’s Congress constitutes simply keeping the lights on.
This week’s shutdown threat was perhaps the most absurd yet. In most budget battles, the two parties are separated by many billions of dollars. Earlier this year, for instance, the compromise budget that averted a shutdown cut $78.5 billion from the president’s budget request. In this debate, however, the parties were separated by a mere $1.6 billion. The fact is that the preparations for — and certainly the reality of — a shutdown probably would have dwarfed the difference between the two bills.
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein is the editor of Wonkblog and a columnist at the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to MSNBC and Bloomberg. His work focuses on domestic and economic policymaking, as well as the political system that’s constantly screwing it up. He really likes graphs, and is on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. E-mail him here.
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Ending weeks of political brinkmanship, Congress finessed a dispute over disaster aid Monday night and advanced legislation to avoid a partial government shutdown only days away. (Sept. 26)
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And even if we escaped catastrophe this time, the new funding agreement will last only until Nov. 18, at which point Congress must decide how to fund the government through 2012. You can bet that debate is likely to lead to a near-shutdown — if not an actual one — too. That will be the fourth shutdown fight of 2011, if you include the debt-ceiling debacle.
These close misses are not, in fact, the same thing as never teetering on the ledge in the first place. Rather, the continued brinkmanship in Washington, where Congress ping-pongs from almost shutting down to almost defaulting on the debt every few months, might be doing the economy much more harm than we realize.
To understand what Congress is risking every time it nears a shutdown, consider what past ones have cost. In 1996, the Office of Management and Budget tallied the two major shutdowns of the decade at about $1.4 billion. Adjusting for inflation would bring that total to more than $2 billion in today’s dollars.
But as an analysis by Roy Meyers, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, found, that estimate left out a lot. It didn’t account for the lost value of work that wasn’t done or the $300 million the federal parks would have taken in or the reduced pace of IRS audits. And then there are the less visible consequences. Meyers suggests that contractors might start charging the government a premium after shutdowns to compensate for the uncertainty of their payments. And a large body of work shows that unstable budget processes at the state level raise borrowing costs. Add those together and a real, sustained shutdown would cost much more than the $1.6 billion that separated this week’s two bills.
Even getting near a shutdown costs money. The government must prepare, and that means a lot of hours spent on nothing useful.
“You have to pull people off whatever they’re doing to inform employees about what they can do and when they can come in,” said Stan Collender, a budget expert at Qorvis communications. “You have to prepare to change the Web sites with new information about what to do during the shutdowns. You have additional security costs for the buildings because you have to lock them up so no one can get in. You have additional maintenance costs in terms of heating and cooling. And let’s say you’re a supplier who is supposed to deliver parts to the government on October 2. What do you do?”
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