One Month In and Substitute Teaching Is Looking Attractive

Reading the political tea leaves, you can get the impression that the shutdown may be settled soon. I'd caution against optimism on that. The Trumpening creates unprecedented conditions that make the old rules of Washington in-fighting no longer apply. 

Looking on the sunny side, you'll note that October is a three-paycheck month for most of us feds (since there are 26 biweekly pay periods in a year but only twelve months), and that may provide a little bemusement. 

I haven't seen this nugget covered by the news media, but at some DOS Bureaus certain of the exempted employees - those are the ones who have to come in to the office despite the shutdown - are actually getting paid. That's because they perform functions the administration has defined as priorities. 

But please keep that quiet, since the large majority of exempted employees are still working without pay. Getting backpay for them after the shutdown ends is authorized by law but is not required, so we'll see how that goes. 

Well, at least us furloughed employees can be happy that we're saving on commuting gas and parking costs. Take that, Arlington County parking meter enforcement quasi-cops!

A Hollow Threat Against an Empty Embassy

Stop blowing up our drug boats or the fortress embassy gets it. https://t.co/8JufdGZ3iN

— TSB (@TweetingTSB) October 7, 2025

Oh, please don't threaten that shutdown embassy office building, Mister Venezuelan Badguy. There's nobody there that you'd want to harm anyway, and if you were to blow it up we'd just have to rebuild it someday. 

Our taxpayers will thank you for your attention to this matter.

By the way, how coincidental is it that the embassy office compound in question was vacated years ago, long before the present government 'shutdown?' 

That touches on my favorite philosophical question about these shutdowns: when we have a federal holiday - or, even better, a snow day - during a shutdown, is that like a double negative that means the government office or embassy is open again?

Now that I'm furloughed, I have plenty of time to ponder that question.

Gov't Shutdown, Unlimited Free Time And No Income

Like about 65 percent of all those who work for [REDACTED] the foreign affairs department of the Washington DC area's largest employer, I've been furloughed. 

Oh, no! What does that mean exactly? Well, I've been banished from the office, and from remote work, and even instructed not to use my official cell phone except to check for more instructions. 

This must be what retirement will be like, except for the part about not being paid. My impression so far is that I can live with it.

In fact, this preview of My Golden Years has revived an earlier interest in making use of that retirement annuity lifetime federal fellowship to do something academic, such as researching and maybe even publishing something about a few pet topics.

For instance, public security measures can be studied as artifacts of material culture. Haven't you ever thought that anti-ram barriers in the city landscape might well unintentionally reveal something about our society and how it has changed over time?     

But all that lies in the future! I have a late relative who worked at DOS for over 50 years, and happily so. I don't plan to break her record, although I now see myself coming rather close. 

I say to you: don't despair, live frugally while we wait out the shutdown and, as 95-year old Clint Eastwood reminds us, the secret to a long life is to not let the old man in.  

The Eight-Hour Government Shutdown Begins Tomorrow

2/20: Federal offices in the DC area are CLOSED. Emergency and telework-ready employees must follow their agency’s policies. https://t.co/XNpFS40aXT pic.twitter.com/3bdAp1kf5c

— OPM (@USOPM) February 20, 2019

57 Million Americans Are Worse Off Than Furloughed Feds

Unemployed men in 1931 dressed better than almost anyone does today 

As direct-hire employees of the U.S. federal government, you and I have a rare good deal. Don't doubt it. Many of my fellow feds have never experienced the private sector, but over in the world of 'at will' employment there is no job security at all, and paychecks do not always arrive on time when liquidity crises occur. Almost no one in the private sector has defined benefits plans anymore, and pensions went away along with the industrial economy. The economic uncertainty some feds are now experiencing is the norm for quite a few of our fellow citizens.

I get it that people have sad tales to tell, but the plight of some federally-employed people simply does not have the political utility some think it has. Americans who live in the gig economy all the time are not likely to be moved.

Today 36 percent of all workers in the U.S. are in the gig economy, where there is no expectation of the kind of pay and benefits that federal employees can take for granted. And we can take it for granted, even if it is temporarily delayed.

"Gallup estimates that 29% of all workers in the U.S. have an alternative work arrangement as their primary job. This includes a quarter of all full-time workers (24%) and half of all part-time workers (49%). Including multiple job holders, 36% have a gig work arrangement in some capacity."

This works out to about 57 million Americans.

Gallup has a broad definition of gig work. Again from their report:

...the gig economy includes multiple types of alternative work arrangements such as independent contractors, online platform workers, contract firm workers, on-call workers and temporary workers.

About those defined benefit plans, they are very scare Outside the Beltway:

The percentage of workers in the private sector whose only retirement account is a defined benefit pension plan is now 4%, down from 60% in the early 1980s. About 14% of companies offer a combination of both types.

Meanwhile, the few employers that still offer traditional pensions - typically industries with a strong union presence, such as the airline and auto sectors – have been working overtime to cut deals to either reduce or eliminate their plans.

If you work for the government?

That's a different story. Traditional pensions are still offered by about 84% of state and local governments.

So count your blessings, and get a second job, just like so many others have to do all the time. Hey, they always need substitute teachers:

Fairfax County Public Schools has added a second hiring event for furloughed federal employees interested in substitute teaching positions. The event is scheduled for Tuesday, January 15, from 2 to 4:30 p.m. at the FCPS Administration Center, 8115 Gatehouse Road, Falls Church, VA 22042. The initial event, scheduled for Friday, January 11, is at capacity.

Don't turn up your nose at sub jobs. They're scheduled day-by-day, so are good for people who may be called back to work at any time, and any type of second job beats applying for unemployment insurance. The money you make is yours, whereas that unemployment benefit will have to be paid back after the shutdown is over, and to qualify for it in the first place you have to be seeking a new job – usually proven by going on three job interviews a week – whereas you furloughed feds aren’t, really, seeking another job.

And don't forget, there are three federal government paydays in January, so everyone had already gotten one check before the lapse in appropriations hit for some yesterday. That will help.

No one can tell how much longer the shutdown will last. Since Trump is passing on the Davos conference this year, that might suggest he expects it to go on past the conference dates of January 22-25. The State of the Union address is scheduled for January 29, and that seems like it would be a good time to wrap things up. Who knows? But I would not expect it to end before the SOTU.

TSA Sickouts Continue, Same as Before

As the Partial Government Shutdown of 2018-2019 extends past the first missed payday, there is lots of press attention being paid to TSA airport screeners calling in sick to protest (TSA Sickouts Worsen Daily), and some speculation that the screeners might quit en masse.

To which I say, what's new about that? Not much. It's the same old situation as before anyone missed a paycheck:

The Transportation Security Administration is a revolving door for more than 8,000 screeners at 10 of the busiest airports in the U.S., data obtained by Bloomberg Law suggest.

The TSA hired nearly as many agents at some sites as left their jobs between 2012 to 2016, according to information provided by the agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The TSA doesn’t separate the data by why an employee left, so the numbers include those who quit, were fired, or retired.

-- snip --

The TSA employs a total of about 11,700 screeners at the 10 airports. The turnover rate across those sites ranged from 30 percent to more than 80 percent over the five years analyzed. Turnover among federal employees overall has hovered around 15 percent during the past three years, Hausknecht said.

Being an airport screener is just a terrible job, and high turnover is inevitable.

Will the churn of TSA personnel get even greater now that they have missed a paycheck - or, more accurately, have had their pay delayed until the shutdown is over? Maybe. And if so, will that make airport screening even slower and more erratic than it is already? Yes, probably. And finally, is there anything that can be done to resolve the Partial Government Shutdown of 2018-2019 anytime soon? No, not really.

One can only feel sympathy for those unpaid screeners. But I wonder if any of that sympathy will continue after the shutdown is over.

The Partial Government Shutdown of 2018-2019 Gets Real Next Week

No furloughed fed has missed a paycheck yet. That will start to happen on January eleventh, the first payday of 2019 (see this handy federal payroll calendar). Until then, all the huffing and puffing between Trump and the House leadership is just so much stage-setting for the deal they will eventually make.

Yet, people are worried. While browsing an article with advice for furloughed federal employees I came across a terrific 2015 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research about how furloughed employees coped with a loss of cash income during the last government shutdown, the one in 2013. Some of the figures on liquidity of the average employee astonished me.

From the paper's abstract:

Using comprehensive account records, this paper examines how individuals respond to a temporary drop in income following the 2013 U.S. Federal Government shutdown. Affected employees saw their income decline by 40% on average, which was recovered within two weeks. Despite having no effect on lifetime earnings, spending dropped sharply, implying a naïve estimate of the marginal propensity to spend of 0.57. This estimate overstates how consumption responded. To smooth consumption, individuals adjusted by delaying recurring payments such as mortgages and credit card balances. Those with the least liquidity struggled most to smooth spending and were left holding more debt months after the shutdown.

Here are the figures I found astonishing:

Prior to the shutdown, the median worker in the data held an average liquid assets balance sufficient to cover just eight days of average spending.

Moreover, liquid assets exhibit systematic changes over the pay-cycle. Just before payday, the median level of liquid assets is only five days of average spending. Indeed, a substantial fraction of this population barely lives paycheck-to-paycheck. On the day before their paycheck arrives, the bottom third of the liquid assets distribution has, on average, a combined checking and savings account balance of zero.

Think of that, the median worker in the data held an average liquid assets balance sufficient to cover just eight days of average spending. Do that many federal employees live paycheck to paycheck?

And the bottom line best advice for feds critically short of income:

This paper provides direct evidence on the importance of deferring debt payments, especially mortgages, as an instrument for consumption smoothing. Mortgages function for many as a primary line of credit. By deferring a mortgage payment, they can continue to consume housing, while waiting for an income loss to be recovered. For changing the timing of mortgage payments within the month due, there is no cost. As discussed above, that is the pattern for the bulk of deferred mortgage payments. Moreover, the cost of paying one month late can also be low. Many mortgages allow a grace period after the official due date, in which not even late charges are incurred, or charge a fee that is 4-6 percent of the late payment. Being late by a month adds only modestly to the total mortgage when interest rates are low, and mortgage service companies cannot report a late payment to credit agencies until it is at least 30 days overdue. Even if there are penalties or costs, late payment of a mortgage is a source of credit that is available without the burden of applying for credit.

The shutdown might be resolved before it comes to the point of deferring mortgage payments. Should the House agree to pass the El Chapo Act, for instance, that might let both sides call it a win. Or Trump might even bypass Congress and sell bonds, which is a current practice of the federal government to raise money for other purposes, or tax the billions of dollars in cash transfers to Mexico and Central America, something that could be done using regulatory authority.

So it might not come to that. But if it does, the home you own is your best store of value.

Well, That Was Very Brief

The Government Shutdown of 2018 barely had time to register with the public before the Senate Democrats voted to end it, with all but 16 - counting the two independents who normally caucus with them - of their 49 members voting to end cloture at 12:30 PM today.

Why such a very quick reversal? Here's a clue: a Harvard-Harris poll conducted just before the Friday night government shutdown found that 65% of voters would support a DACA deal that secures the Southern border, ends chain migration, and eliminates the visa lottery. That level of support was consistent across nearly every demographic group, including 68% of those who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Whats more, fully 81% of voters want to reduce legal immigration by at least half of its current number.

I'm guessing the Democratic caucus took one look at its internal polling on DACA and gave up that fight as quickly as they possibly could, getting nothing in return from the Republic leadership except the promise of a future Senate vote on some still-to-be-identified bill, something which neither the House nor the White House have so much as promised to consider.
    

Can Gov't Shutdown Theater Play When An Administration Won't Set the Stage?

So THE GOVERNMENT IS SHUT DOWN, oh my! Of course, it's normally shut down on a Saturday anyway, but if the shutdown continues into Monday, here's how it will, or more often won't, effect my fellow feds:

Social Security checks will still go out. Except there have been no actual checks since March 2013, after which date all federal benefit payments have been made electronically, but, you know, they continue to exist as a rhetorical scare tactic.

Doctors and hospitals will still receive Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. Federal employees will continue to receive health benefits even if their agency doesn’t make premium payments on time. According to OPM's shutdown guidance, the enrollee share of Federal Employee Health Benefits Program premiums will accumulate and be withheld from pay upon return to pay status.

Federal Employees’ Group Life Insurance Program enrollees will continue to receive coverage for 12 consecutive months without cost to the worker or the agency. Federal retirees under both the Federal Employees Retirement System and the old Civil Service Retirement System will continue to receive scheduled annuity payments. The Thrift Savings Plan will operate as normal except that furloughed employees will not be able to make payroll contributions while they are not getting paid.

The 850,000 or so federal employees who may be furloughed come Monday morning can safely assume they will get back pay when the fiscal hoopla is over, as has happened after each and every previous lapse in appropriations.

All law enforcement functions will go on as usual, and Transportation Security Administration officers will continue to screen airport passengers. National parks and monuments will remain open.

Speaking of those monuments, that's where Government Shutdown Theater began. The National Parks Director back in the Nixon Administration would protest budget cuts to his agency by shutting down parks and monuments for two days a week:

When the Nixon Administration cut the NPS budget in 1969, [NPS Director George] Hartzog responded by closing all the national parks for two days a week, including prominent landmarks like the Washington Monument. He later commented, “It was unheard of; even my own staff thought I was crazy.” There was political criticism by both Republicans and Democrats, but the magnitude of citizen complaints persuaded Congress to reverse its decision and restore the funds. Hartzog’s strategy was dubbed the “Washington Monument Syndrome” by The Washington Post.

We saw a lot of that strategy during the 16-day government shutdown in 2013, including the utter absurdity of yellow tape put up around open air monuments. There won't be any of that from the Trump Administration.

Like that tree that falls in forest, will the public notice a government shutdown that makes no noise?

Did the 2013 Shutdown Cause a Temporarily Bloated Government Workforce?

I am dubious about this story, but it is being reported that the Government Shutdown May Have Caused a DC Area Baby Boom:

The 2013 government shutdown, which lasted from Oct. 1 to Oct. 16, was the cause of a lot of anxiety in the D.C. area.

With so many government workers living in the District, Maryland and Virginia, thousands were anxious about falling behind on bills while they weren’t receiving paychecks. We now have an idea of what they may have done to soothe their nerves.

July 1 marked exactly 9 months since many government workers in the area were sent home for more than two weeks as Congress argued about the nation’s finances.

WNEW’s Kimberly Suiters reports that Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington has seen an additional 100 babies born in the last three months compared to that time period in 2013.

Sibley Hospital in Northwest D.C. has seen three more babies than normal per day this month.

I'm not convinced. First of all, while it may be true that "many" government workers were anxious during the so-called government shutdown, in fact only 30 percent of them weren't paid during that period. Most of them continued to work and get paid as usual. So why would they need to soothe their nerves the inside-the-belt way? I mean, any more often than usual?

Of course, during the government 'shutdown' we were unable to spend all day and night watching the National Zoo's Giant Panda cam, as usual. So maybe my bored fellow feds were tappin' dat body politic to fill the otherwise empty hours.

Or, maybe it was that the resolution of the budget impasse unleashed a wave of unrestrained joy among Washington civil servants? Like V-E Day, only much smaller and localized? 

  

70% of Federal Salaries Were Paid During the Shutdown

Treasury Secretary Gallatin, fiscal hardass

During the Great Government Shutdown of Fiscal Year 2014 (October 1 to 16) the U.S. Treasury reported paying out $6.246 billion in federal salaries and another $2.801 billion in insurance premiums for federal employees. That appears to be about 70 percent of the amount that would have been paid to salaries under normal operations.

So I guess we should call it the 30 percent shutdown.

It is an historic irony that our longest-serving Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin (1801 to 1813, under presidents Jefferson and Madison), would probably have backed the shutdown. As a Jeffersonian, he hated having a national debt at all, and devoted three quarters of federal revenue to pay it down. He helped to create the House Committee on Finance, forerunner of the modern Ways and Means Committee, and encouraged the tactic of withholding funds by the House as a method of exercising congressional oversight of the executive branch.

Government Reopens And It's All Unicorns and Rainbows

It's morning again in Washington

The deal was cut on Capital Hill last night, the debt ceiling was raised again (so we can add more to the 16.7 trillion we owe now), and today 800,000 Federal employees went back to work, joining the 1,350,000 who had been there all along.

The only cloud I see on the horizon is that the National Zoo's Giant Panda cam is still dark this evening. Let's get with it, people!

I don't get that. It doesn't cost anything to run a web cam anyway - and Ford is its corporate sponsor in case it does - so why can't Americans go back to watching non-stop panda adorableness? Unicorns and rainbows just aren't the same without pandas.

Government Shutdown Day 11: Thin Gruel

Us Feds are still hanging in there

The WaPo is running a long End Of Week Two Story about the government shutdown (here), and I fully agree with this part:

The federal government has become the behemoth that cried wolf. For more than two decades, budget brinksmanship has been such a mainstay of Washington politics that many Americans long ago grew skeptical of claims that if one deal or another weren’t made, the Statue of Liberty would close or the nation’s highways would seize up in the mother of all gridlocks.

-- snip --

But the reality is that the government is too large and too complex for something as dramatic as a shutdown to cause anything as dramatic as an actual shutdown. At the peak of this latest closing, 800,000 out of about 1.9 million civilian federal employees were put on ice. Many arms of government still had half, three-quarters or even nine-tenths of their workers coming in every day, despite the closing of the money spigot.

"The government is too large and too complex for something as dramatic as a shutdown to cause anything as dramatic as an actual shutdown." Um .. okay .. if that means what I think it means, I agree. The administration has to dramatize the real shutdown - that is, the budget impasse - by staging a phony shutdown. Hence, the passive-aggressive nonsense of roping off open air monuments on the Washington Mall and scenic overlooks in national parks to make the impasse visible to Joe Citizen.

Would Joe Citizen otherwise notice the shutdown that some parts of the federal government are not at work? Truthfully, no. Not unless he's employed by the feds either directly or via a contractor, or married to someone who is, or gets a check from some social program or other, or works for a business that gets regulated. That's a lot of people, but not nearly so many as the Washington hive assumes.

Meanwhile, I'm warming up my soup.

The Crisis Continues 

Government Shutdown Day 4, And It's Pretty Much Total Apocalypse

It's bad, all right. The National Park Service has closed its parks and monuments. The National Zoo's beloved Giant Panda Cam has gone dark, even though it says it's sponsored by the Ford Motor Company Fund, and I didn't think Ford was shut down, too. U.S. Embassy Twitter feeds are not being regularly updated "due to the lapse in appropriations" necessary to do so (what?).

Finally, last night, packs of mountain lions were seen roaming the abandoned streets of Washington DC. That's right. As government retreats, nature, red in tooth and claw, advances.

Government Shutdown Theater aside, my sympathy goes out to anyone experiencing financial distress. All you can do is be prepared to ride it out, and remember that these lapses in appropriations rarely last more than a week or two. As a commenter told me, it's time to practice the ancient art of home economics until this shutdown blows over.

Relax, My Fellow Feds, Relax

Some colleagues, taking a break from work

NPR ran a calm and measured short history of government shutdowns yesterday, which I thought was a most welcome change from the otherwise hysterical media coverage of Washington's budget impasse. Did you know that these shutdowns used to treated with a big yawn? They were.

"In the '60s and '70s down until 1980, it was not taken that seriously at all," says Charles Tiefer, a former legal adviser to the House of Representatives, who now teaches at the University of Baltimore Law School. In the old days, he says, when lawmakers reached a budget stalemate, the federal workforce just went about its business.

"It was thought that Congress would soon get around to passing the spending bill and there was no point in raising a ruckus while waiting," he says.

Ah, the good old days. "No point in raising a ruckus" about a passing event that is, in any case, an inevitable consequence of our system of divided government. Such an adult attitude. But then, we didn't have the internet back in the 60s and 70s, or even cable TV, so how would you raise a ruckus in the first place? By the time you did that with print media, I suppose a new budget would have been approved.

It was Jimmy Carter's administration that invented Government Shutdown Theater. Turning Boy Scout Troops away from a closed Washington Monument, predicting that airplanes will fall from the skies and farmers will wander the earth not knowing what to plant without their Federal controllers and extension agents, and all that. I don't see how that was an improvement, but maybe it took people's minds off of the economic stagflation and 'odd/even' gasoline rationing that Carter had going on.

"They [Carter's Justice Department] used an obscure statute to say that if any work continued in an agency where there wasn't money, the employees were behaving like illegal volunteers," says Tiefer. "So they not only could shut off the lights and leave, they were obliged to shut off the lights and leave."

In the years leading up to [AG] Civiletti's opinion, budget standoffs lasting a week or more were commonplace. But after the opinion, no standoff lasted more than three days until the epic government shutdowns of 1995.

The WaPo has a list of the 17 previous government shutdowns since 1976, when the current budgeting process took effect. These things are not that unusual, and are normally over in a few days. Until then, it's best to remain calm and carry on, as the posters say. Complaining to your Congressman, bitching to the newspapers, and - most of all - picketing either Congress or the White House, are silly and counterproductive.

Fellow Feds, I say, don't be a bit player in Government Shutdown Theater. Refuse to raise a ruckus while we wait for a resolution. It would be quite pointless anyway. Outside the bubble of Washington DC no one, but no one, feels any sympathy for a class of people who make more than the average American, have better employment benefits than almost anyone else, and are least likely of all to be affected by the severe economic downturn that's going on out there in Real America. Those of us who don't get out of the bubble much need that tough love message occasionally.

I know it's easier said than done, but really, the best course is to relax, light up a smoke (at least metaphorically), and ignore the breathless panic-mongering that feeds the 24-hour news cycle.