The countdown is on: the United States is heading towards a new “shutdown”, or the cessation, for lack of funding, of all non-essential government activities. The spending laws currently financing the functioning of the federal state expire on Saturday, September 30. This means that any part of the administration whose appropriations bill is not passed and signed by 12 a.m. October 1, the start date of fiscal year 2024, could shut down.
This paralysis which threatens the services of the federal state would come only four months after the world’s largest economy came close to defaulting on payments. It is the consequence of a political blockage in Congress, between a Senate, with a Democratic majority, and a House of Representatives, in the hands of the Republicans.
The United States Constitution provides that the Senate and the House of Representatives vote on the federal budget after a long process. Each year, the White House prepares a proposed budget for the following year’s fiscal year, which begins October 1. Joe Biden presented his on March 9 in Philadelphia.
Then, from March to June, twelve subcommittees in each chamber are responsible for distributing the credits intended for the federal government in each area (defense, agriculture, justice, etc.) and examine the requests of the executive.
The Senate and the House of Representatives then each produce a bill, which is examined from July to October. These discussions regularly turn into a standoff, with each side raising the specter of stopping federal services to obtain concessions from the other, usually with a last-minute resolution.
This year, the budget crisis could have repercussions beyond the United States, all the way to Ukraine. The White House had initially demanded that the finance law passed by elected officials include $24 billion (22.7 billion euros) in military and humanitarian aid for kyiv. But a text circulating in the Senate on Tuesday only provided for a quarter of this sum, or around $6 billion (€5.7 billion).
Meanwhile, in the Republican-dominated House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy is under pressure: he wants to link his support for Ukraine to plans for new restrictions on the reception of migrants seeking asylum in the United States . While the Trumpist elected officials, to whom he owes his position as Speaker of the House, want purely and simply to stop helping Ukraine.
Donald Trump invited himself into the debates by inciting, on his Truth Social network, the Republicans in Congress to defund “the government used as a weapon by the corrupt Joe Biden (…) who treats half of the country as an enemy of ‘State “.
A shutdown would have consequences for millions of Americans, with varying magnitude depending on the duration and scope of this paralysis of the federal administration. The Federal Government Employees Union (AFGE) estimates that “up to 4 million military and civilian employees will be affected,” of which “2.2 million are federal employees,” the remainder being “active duty military and reservists.”
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a bipartisan organization, recalls that during the shutdowns of 2013 and early 2018, “approximately 850,000 of the 2.1 million federal employees (excluding the postal service) were furloughed” . The organization is compiling a list of affected services, from air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Agency (TSA) officials to rangers who work in national parks.
“Some 1.3 million active duty soldiers will work without being paid,” said John Kirby, coordinator of the National Security Council, in a video posted on the White House Instagram account.
Two food aid programs could also be undermined: WIC, a nutritional assistance program on which nearly 7 million women and children depend, “which concerns nearly half of the babies born in this country” , according to the White House, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), which serves 40 million low-income Americans.
The CRFB emphasizes that some essential services would “continue to operate”: border protection, hospital medical care, air traffic control, law enforcement or maintenance of the electricity grid. “Some legislative and judicial staff were also largely protected” during previous shutdowns, notes the organization.
This blockage would also have a modest impact on the economy, recall the economists of the bank Goldman Sachs: each week of shutdown could cost 0.15 to 0.2 points of growth to the GDP of the United States in the 4th quarter. In turn, it will be necessary to count an identical impact in the 1st quarter of 2024, they emphasize.
Since 1976, there have been 21 shutdowns, 10 of which led to furloughs of federal civil servants. The most serious crisis occurred in 1995-1996, under President Bill Clinton, and the longest government shutdown occurred between 2018 and 2019, for thirty-five days, when President Trump and the Democrats Congress has clashed over its request for funding for a wall on the border with Mexico.
At present, Congress has not adopted any of the 12 projects examined in subcommittees in the House or the Senate for the 2024 fiscal year. Failing to agree, a continuing resolution, a draft provisional budget, could be adopted.
The Washington Post noted that the federal government began informing federal employees of the impending shutdown on Thursday, with a message announcing that “during this period, some of [them] will be temporarily furloughed, while others, who perform exceptional functions, will continue to carry out the tasks assigned to them.”
