Here's What A Government Shutdown Means For MoCo Workers

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The dreaded government shutdown is looming, and Congress is racing against the clock to get a spending deal approved before the Friday deadline hits. If you're a federal employee, a government shutdown would obviously have a very big effect on you -- but exactly what would happen?

Funding will expire on Saturday without a deal, meaning hundreds of thousands of federal employees that are non-essential will be told not to come in to work. The last government shutdown in 2013 resulted in 850,000 federal workers being furloughed per day, causing the shuttering of not just government offices, but also national parks and museums, according to an NBC News report.

The military, law enforcement, TSA screeners, border patrol agents, and other essential federal employees will continue to work despite the shutdown. However, they won't get paid unless more funding is authorized by Congress, which is what happened in 2013 with the Pay Our Military Act, NBC News notes.

There are a lot of federal employees in Maryland -- more than 145,000, in fact. Federal workers who are idled potentially will lose income altogether if they aren't retroactively paid. But there are a huge amount of other variables as well, as Patch reported in a past article on the 2013 shutdown government shutdown.

Those variables include:

• The length of the possible shutdown.
• Whether furloughed federal workers would be retroactively paid.
• Would there be a delay in processing federal grants?
• Would the loss of daily federal commuters impact Metro revenues?
• Would a shutdown and loss of income to federal workers who live here in Maryland lead to foreclosures?
• Would there be more need for local social services for federal workers on the margin?
• Would a federal government shutdown cause people to stop buying things and thus reduce our sales tax revenue?
• Would a federal government shutdown impact business and sales tax revenue related to those segments of our business community that receive federal contracts?
• How would a shutdown impact the bond market?

Basically, there is a lot we don't know yet on what this looming shutdown means for federal workers, if it happens at all. But if it does happen, it will certainly mean a big cut to paychecks in our area, and definitely a hit to the local economy as a result.

"We could avoid a government shutdown by sitting down and coming to an agreement that would get the support of a majority of both sides. That's what we should have been working on last year, instead of rushing through the Trump-Republican tax scam," Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen tweeted Thursday.

What worries you most about a shutdown? Let us know in the comments below.

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