It’s Not Me, It’s You – and Other Tales from a Government Shutting Down

Except… I’m assuming the gigantic cartoon hand popping out and stopping traffic was just concept art. In real life, bridges and crossing signals cost money to build. Just because our friend Bill is a law doesn’t mean those things magically appear. Instead, Bill (ahem, “Law”) needs to go sit in front of the Appropriations Committee whose job it is to dole out the cash to pay for the construction. In our movie, our friend, Law, would go meet a bunch of other laws just like him and they’d all go audition for the House Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Other. The winners would get bundled up and passed to the full Committee… and so on.

Or at least that was how it used to work.

I say “used to” because we haven’t passed a full slate of appropriations bills since 1996. Instead, Congress has used a patchwork of new priority spending and “continuing resolutions” (CRs) which are just an easy way to say we’re all gonna agree to just keep paying for all the things we paid for last year and call it good. These are usually lumped into something called an “omnibus.” The logic of an omnibus is that, even if you don’t like all the stuff in the massive, amalgamated bill, you probably like a part of it so much that you don’t want to vote against the whole thing. It’s a handy strategy – not unlike making a spoonful of mashed peas into an airplane coming in for a landing… Of course, that also means we never get around to going through the list of railroad crossings and other things we decided we needed a long time ago.

There’s another problem with this strategy. There are a bunch of things we don’t really need anymore but no one ever gets around to deciding to STOP paying for them.

A few months ago, I signed up for a service that would scan my credit card bill and alert me to all the subscription services I had signed up for and forgotten about. (Ironically, that service is also a subscription that I have conveniently forgotten to cancel.) I was shocked to discover all the small little things I was still paying for and how they all added up. Even then, my oldest subscription was maybe a COVID impulse buy. If I was still buying things I thought were important in 1996 I’d have a closet full of unused hair scrunchies and a whole lot of debt.

Can you even conceive of not noticing all that money evaporating into thin air? Why would you if your credit cards were never declined at the grocery store, restaurant, or doctor’s office. Instead of cutting you off, lenders would just keep raising your spending limit (raising the debt ceiling). Your credit score might take a little hit, but you’d quickly figure out that you could just keep borrowing money anyway… After all, no debt collectors came banging down your door asking for you to pay for that shiny new war you bought a few years back… or that other one you borrowed from the Russians but then decided to give back.

Ok, ok, maybe it’s a little more complicated than that and not all those scrunchies are still on the books, but I think we can all agree there’s a pretty big mess. We also all know it’s a whole lot easier to be righteously indignant and blame the other party for behaving like a college kid with an emergencies-and-pizza-only credit card from their parents than it is to go back and clean up the mess. Hollywood makes it look so easy. In Dave, a down-on-his-luck actor who fills in for the president after he had a stroke, hashes out a budget with his cabinet over some coffee and pastries. In a slightly more acrimonious take, Aaron Sorkin invoked the “once-in-a-lifetime” drama of the Clinton/Gingrich shutdown when President Bartlett engaged in a war of political stunts with the opposition. Of course he ends up winning the day when Josh encourages him to stage a press-friendly stroll over to Capitol Hill to humiliate the Speaker of the House.

In real life, we’re far less likely to see the tension resolve at the end of the episode. In fact, we’ve gotten quite accustomed to the losing team moving the finish line and declaring that the race is still going rather than accepting defeat.

But this post isn’t meant to be fodder for the government fat cats trope. In fact, I wanted to try to show you the opposite. People think of DC as “the swamp”: a cesspool of con artists and opportunists. And sure, that may be true of some people here, but the reality is that most of those people are sent here by the voters. As the Washingtonian is known to put it:

The Charge: DC is hopelessly polarized.
The Defense: No, You are.

A lot of the people who chose to live and work in and around DC are not doing it for the money. Most of the people I know in government service could be making way more money in the private sector but they have devoted their lives and donated their expertise to make this country a better place. Whenever there is shutdown talk, I find myself wishing for a Humans of New York-like documentary highlighting all the people who will be heading into work for the foreseeable future, with no promise of a paycheck. All they have to keep them going is the weight of the declaration that what they do is “essential” to the function of the government, your government.

In my mini-doc, I would introduce the older woman with her sensible flats and a packed lunch, bundled against the cold as she makes three changes on the metro and bus system to show up to oversee the budget for a new literacy program at the Department of Education. Next, I’d show my husband, losing sleep over all the potential threats against our country we might have missed because we didn’t have people where he thought we needed them. I’d ask him what morale must be like among his former Capitol Police colleagues who were reminded recently of the consequences of missing the signs of those threats. I’d also interview my sister as she got up pre-dawn to make lunch for her girls before heading to treat children with cancer or to her lab at the National Institutes of Health. Maybe I’d interview the girls’ dad, but I probably couldn’t show his face because in the past he wasn’t deemed essential, so he had to break into his lab to keep his cells, and his research alive.

To be fair, I’d also probably put a spotlight on some of the interesting new economies that pop up around town. For example, during the first few days of the shutdown, the Washington Post will be filled with stories about restaurants offering specials for federal employees and banks promoting new, short-term loans. Local colleges and universities have even been known to offer short courses and professional certificates programs, marketing to a captive audience of Type A individuals with nothing to do with their time. From that perspective, a shutdown may not be so bad. Shutdown is sabbatical for policy wonks who know they’ll get paid, eventually. Congress has always approved back pay for anyone who has worked without a paycheck and usually the non-essentials too.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who aren’t so lucky. Many hourly government contractors never see back pay so I’d probably want to interview them too. I’m not talking about the “skilled” workers executing some big government contract. I’m talking about the people who work in food service or cleaning and maintenance. Backpay on those contracts is a little less reliable. Congress sometimes “forgets.” These families are now faced with an impossible decision: show up to work and hope you’ll eventually get paid or quit so you can find work to pay the bills. I’d note that Congress always pushes these votes to the very last minute so we can expect the height of the drama to fall just before the Holidays, putting these families in even more precarious positions.