A Lapsed Federal Employee's View of a Shutdown

Five years ago I couriered the signed Veterans Affairs appropriations bill from Vegas back to DC. Aside from being the only time I'll ever carry $209 Billion in my backpack, it turned out to be what ensured that veterans continued to receive the care they need throughout the longest government shutdown in history. Now, as we head into Veterans Day, we're facing the possibility of another government shutdown. There are no appropriations bills this time, Federal funding runs out next Friday, and Congress critters have gone home for the weekend rather than work on the nation's urgent needs.

Yet again, we're heading into another manufactured crisis over the Federal budget. Yet again, the nation's largest employer is faced with furloughing millions of employees as we head into the holidays. Yet again, we're about to stop paying members of the military, giving veterans life saving and life changing care, supporting investments in vital infrastructure projects to keep Americans safe from disaster, and providing services to enrich our economy, foster our culture, and advance our interests with nations around the world.

I wanted to say it doesn't have to be this way, but at this point, I think that's a lie. If I google, "when was the last time the Federal budget was passed in regular order" it turns out that it was when Google was still in beta testing at Stanford. Yes, if you saw the last time all 12 appropriations bills were passed and signed, you had just witnessed the first ever WNBA game, watched the sentencing of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City Bombing, read the first Harry Potter book as it was released, and heard about this new invention called DVD that was coming for your VHS collection. For anyone running off to search, this was 1997 and we didn't even get all the bills done on time.

So it has been 26 years of getting it wrong. Of Congressional Resolutions, omnibus bills, and government shutdowns (there have been three since then). In that time we've sequenced the human genome; invented hybrid cars, social media, the iPhone, and wifi; experienced 9/11 and the wars that followed, and even forgotten many of the lessons we learned from them.

Moreover, 13% of the voting age population today wasn't even born the last time a budget was passed in regular order. Neither were more than half of the staffers working on Capitol Hill today. So we can't even say that the dysfunction we're seeing this year is the new normal. At this point, it's baked into the system.

As these manufactured crises have become normalized, though, we lose sight of the impacts to the Federal government and the nation because of Congress' abject rejection of its own rules. It's easy to say, "oh well, what's the harm?" when it happens all the time. Surely, we'll saunter on ok. Surely we don't need to jump out of this pot of water that's about to boil.

Let me tell you, though, there are major impacts. You'll read all sorts of reporting on what services won't be available when the government shuts down and how many billions of dollars it will cost the economy. But the impacts go well beyond that. The continued morass of omnibus bills and threats of shutdowns alone harm programs across government.

See, when Congress fails to do its job, it sets the condition for frustration all across government. Having been a leader in Federal agencies through three shutdowns (and the threat of many more) I can tell you it costs us:

• Time
• Effectiveness
• Innovation
• Motivation.

Time: When a "lapse in appropriations" (that's the technical term for what causes a shutdown) is on the horizon, the government has to plan for what it will do. Who stays, who goes, what money can be spent, what money can't. Of course, there are myriad complexities associated with this based on what services support safety and security, which are funded through unique mechanisms such as fees for service, and which support the President in performing Constitutional duties. The Office of Management and Budget has to determine and promulgate guidance and because each situation is unique based on what Congress has and hasn't passed, this has to start from scratch every single time. That guidance goes to agency Chiefs of Staff who determine how to implement. They then work with professional managers across their department to determine how to affect an "orderly shutdown of operations." Federal managers are tasked with identifying person by person and dollar by dollar what will continue to be performed in case there is a government shutdown. As you can imagine, going person by person and dollar by dollar in a government that employs 4 Million people and spends $4 Trillion doesn't happen quickly. Come July, if it looks like Congress can't get it's act together yet again, this process kicks off.

The plans that are developed are not a simple yes/no either. For staff who will be furloughed, specific guidance has to be provided. They can't do any work, use issued devices to stay in touch with with colleagues and receive updates or direction, and most certainly can't enter their facilities (even if it's to pick up the lunch they forgot in their desk which will turn into a moldy biohazard experiment by the time they get back). For staff who will be required to report to work, the plans are even more complex. They can't do their whole job - only the limited set of their responsibilities that is covered by requirements that meet the criteria for continuing minimal operations during a lapse in appropriations. No finishing the proposal they were working on, approving the invoice in their queue, writing the project plan for a required initiative - only those actions construed to be in scope by their department's Chief of Staff. Once all of these decisions are made, they have to be coordinated across departments and agencies. I often worked on programs that involved people from across 15-20 agencies and they all had different interpretations of guidance and shutdown plans, to the point that a single agency could disrupt the work of many others because they didn't have funding in time.

All of this takes time. If you believe that time is money, then you'll start to get a sense of how many millions of taxpayer dollars are going to shutdown planning well before the money runs out. I, and pretty much everyone that has held a GS-14 and above position, will tell you that there is never enough time to meet all of your Congressionally mandated responsibilities. Being a leader in the Federal government is constant triage of more work than your resources will allow. So this distraction from work to figure out how to deal with Congress' inability to do their job just means more time away from doing what the American people need. This is time that wasn't spent mentoring and developing employees, providing oversight of allocated funds to find and fix waste fraud, and abuse, reviewing threats and risks to develop appropriate mitigations, and identifying ways to improve efficiency.

Effectiveness: Beyond allocating money, much of what goes into the Federal budget is specific direction for the wide array of programs run across 64 Departments and Agencies of the Federal government. While shutdowns mean much of that work doesn't get done, omnibus bills mean much of that work never gets the direction or adjustment it needs. As a result, we end up with major gaps between what Congress has authorized and what they actually provide money to accomplish. In some cases, they give money to programs without a valid authorization and in others they direct new work that never gets money. In 2019, the Congressional Budget Office reported that there were 971 expired authorizations in 257 laws for which Congress still authorized $307 Billion. Rather than do the work of oversight, examining what programs are effective, which aren't, and legislating based on facts and findings, appropriators pick a top line number based on the previous year's spending and tell the Federal government, "just keep doing what you're doing."

All of this is a headwind to people trying to make Federal programs work. As someone who worked disaster recovery efforts for a couple of the worst years of natural disasters we've ever had, I saw the pain it cause to people who had lost everything and still couldn't get the help they needed from the government. Your town qualifies for a Federal grant to build a flood wall so you can redevelop your downtown? Wait until next year. You know your emergency communications system doesn't reach all the people it should. Too bad, a replacement was authorized but not funded. You just discovered a cutting edge technology that can increase crop yields for farmers across the country. Maybe we can develop that in a couple years (keep your fingers crossed China doesn't steal the technology in the meantime).

The Federal government is large and complex, but it all runs on Congressional authorization and appropriation. When that process breaks down, as it has for a generation, Federal employees can have all the knowledge and desire to serve the people, but their hands are tied.

Innovation: I alluded to this above, but contrary to popular belief, the Federal government is an incredibly innovative organization. It's laboratories are at the absolute edge of new discoveries, bringing technology to life in ways that then enable the private sector to flourish. Only the Federal government can fund the type of foundational research that's necessary to develop the next generation of technology. You're reading this on the internet - developed by government. You've got a GPS in your pocket that will navigate you across the entirety of the planet - developed by government. You may even cook dinner on your teflon pan today - developed by government (the teflon that is, not the pan).

If you live in a hurricane prone area, you may have noticed that the size of the "cone of uncertainty" has gotten smaller in recent years. It's directly due to innovation. Since 2010, the size of the 5 day forecast track has reduced by about 31%. Part of that is due to new weather satellites NOAA launched in 2016 and 2018. Those launches should have occurred earlier, but were delayed in part because of cuts contained in the 2013 budget deal known as the sequester, which did not end up staving off an eventual government shutdown later that year.

I've worked with people in every department and agency of the Federal government. I've worked with countless state and local officials as well. Every single one of them is absolutely dedicated to doing their job well, learning, innovating, and being a responsible steward of taxpayer funds. I have seen the pain on their face when they know they can do better but are backed into a corner of how to run their program because of what's contained in stale and outdated authorizing or appropriations language.

Motivation: Speaking of my former colleagues, many of them are walking out the door. I don't think I've ever felt as guilty as I did during the 2018-2019 government shutdown. I led an interagency team of 10 people and I was the only one on our team getting paid (the appropriations for my agency had passed but none of theirs had). Over Christmas and New Years, these people were working 15 hour days to help hurricane and wildfire survivors get the help they needed. They were pulling together efforts to make the 2020 election, "the most secure in history." They were even developing exercises to test pandemic preparedness. They were active duty military, emergency managers, scientists, diplomats, and they weren't getting a dime to come in and do hard work for long hours away from their loved ones.

Their stories were indicative of what hundreds of thousands of Federal employees across the country were experiencing. Let me ask you; how long are you showing up to work if you're not getting paid? How about if it's the second time it's happened that year and the third time in five years? How about if you trade higher pay in the private sector for the (supposed) increased stability in government?

There's not an organization on Earth that can subject their employees to that level of disrespect and expect them to still come in every day fully motivated to get the job done. In a workforce where 15% of employees are eligible to retire today and another 30% are eligible within the next 5 years, it's a recipe for a brain drain. And that's exactly what happened. After the shutdown in 2013, Federal retirements jumped 24% in a single year. After the shutdowns in 2018 and 2019, retirements jumped 13% higher than they had been in 2017. That's just the people that are retiring. Obviously I'm sitting in the private sector now, partially because it's increasingly difficult to meet homeland and national security missions when Congress can't get its job done. About half of my colleagues from the 2018-2019 shutdown have moved on to other opportunities outside the Federal government. I know we're not alone and there are many more across all departments and agencies who have moved on.

Who are these people leaving and retiring? In most cases, its people with the institutional knowledge we need to combat today's most urgent threats and challenges. In the national security space, we raised a generation of talent in the Global War on Terrorism. They are some exceptional public servants. But they developed a different skillset than what is used to address strategic geopolitical competition with Russia and China. The people who led programs through the Cold War and the peace dividend of the 1990s and understand how to adjust programs to meet changing threats are moving on and taking their knowledge with them. Same as with the people who professionalized emergency management after Hurricane Andrew struck. Don't get me wrong, there are exceptional public servants in place today. There's also a lot of institutional knowledge and useful lessons walking out the door. We've already lost most of the people that have any experience of the system working like it's supposed to.

So, as we head into Veterans Day, it's very easy to offer a "thanks for your service" to our veterans. But let's be worthy of their service and sacrifice and demand better of our government. Let's tell our Representatives that they have to do better. That forcing yet another government shutdown on the nation is completely and totally unacceptable. That this latest foray into childish behavior is threatening our national security at a uniquely fragile moment. This weekend, everytime I stop to thank a veteran, I'm firing off an e-mail to my Congresswoman and Senators. Everytime I watch a ceremony to honor them, I'm going to tell my Representatives to do right by us all and get to work.

This mess has become far too normalized over the last 26 years and it's unacceptable. Over the next year, we have the opportunity to tell them that. Every last one of them, no matter what letter comes after their name. There's no more room for showboating, pandering, and finger pointing. Look to the employees you're harming. They're honorable, dedicated, and innovative. Do right by them or find someone who will.

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