Some agencies, workers still feeling effects of shutdown -- FederalSoup.com

Some agencies, workers still feeling effects of shutdown

By FederalSoup Staff
Jul 26, 2019

Six months after the end of the federal government's longest partial shutdown, some federal employees, agencies and government contractors are still feeling its effects, USA Today reports.

According to the report, experts akin the latest shutdown to a community rebuilding after a tornado, noting that Customs and Border Protection, for example, still has a notice on its website that the partial shutdown resulted in a backlog of applications and renewals for the agency’s traveler programs.

The lapse in appropriations also affected hiring and training the Federal Aviation Administration, a backlog of much needed maintenance projects at the National Park Service, and the Internal Revenue Service’s Taxpayer Advocate Service says will take more than a year before it fully recovers, the article notes, adding that some individuals have reported being unable to catch-up on missed mortgage payments, lost their vehicles due to missed payments and no longer have money in their savings accounts, according to the article.

Reader comments

Mon, Aug 26, 2019 esquire1072 Washington D.C.

Lucy C., let s/he who is without sin, cast the first stone...

Mon, Jul 29, 2019 Lucy C. Washington DC

THANK YOU FOR PRINTING THIS ARTICLE! The Federal SHUTDOWN was devastating! My company lost Navy, General Dynamics, and other contracts - including key programs with TSCi/poly attached (myself personally, losing a poly for an ODNI senior role... leading intelligence community reform) solely because the programs funding the clearances were cancelled by TRUMP. And that work, those salaries, those contracts will never come back. People on the outside don't 'get' what it's like to work your entire career for a great opportunity and then have some totally unexpected, bizarre, political decision ruin it. There will never be another chance to revise the entire Intelligence Community, or lead such revision / reorg. My contractors lost key Navy, navy to White House, missile and other work. I paid others first to the best of my ability, and then I went 3 months with no earnings at all. It was ironic, and gratifying, when some of my security work was introduced during the recent Iran show-down, by the Pentagon. But people who never served America, were fine. Attorneys, bankers, restaurant workers - people who do not have lives depending on them, or who are even bad people, as many attorneys are, supporting corruption or vice or courts, were fine. And I don't think the White House or Congress EVER fully understood what we were going through. We were the ones designing their new missile defense, keeping their intelligence safe, telling them the future - and we were literally starving. Jobs and contracts did not come back to our sector til late March, early April. Then net-30 terms, and it was really May before the pay returned. Mantech got fined $2M for its treatment of contractors who protested their treatment of shutdown workers. Mike Pompeo gave General Dynamics a $2 Billion bail-out, or it might have gone under / closed, also. They were one of our primes, and they stopped paying the second the Shutdown hit. They had no surplus cash reserves to last through several months, paying as promised. Outsiders don't know these things. They don't know that had the US Secretary of State not made policy decisions supporting later expenditures, GD, its CEO earning $20 Million annually, would have been dead also. It is devastating to have HR Directors for CIA and FBI, NASA, ODNI all calling you in early fall - they like your work or your company's work -but a month later your TSC and the programs funding them are gone. Your clearance is owned by who paid for it. And attorneys or bankers or Indians on H1B at Fannie or Freddie, earning $200k but never risking their lives for the US, were fine. Junior fbi and many in intel and thousands others, will not be 'fine' for a long time- trauma, futures, credit, families. Almost 600 GovCon business failed here? And WE WERE THE ONES who risked lives for America.