Like others caught up in the U.S. government shutdown, Brent Langdon has been cutting back on spending and is worried about his next mortgage payment.
Yet unlike the hundreds of thousands of federal workers affected by the funding impasse, Langdon can’t look forward to eventually getting back pay because he is a contractor.
“It’s very concerning right now,” said Langdon, who does information technology for the Agriculture Department in Colorado. “I’m looking for side gigs, something to help pay the bills.”
The cumulative effects on Langdon and more than 1 million other contractors is enough to slow U.S. economic growth. The White House on Tuesday doubled its estimate of the cost of the government shutdown on the economy -- saying it hadn’t been counting the effects on government contractors.
As the government shutdown that began Dec. 22, federal contractors are being hit particularly hard by the budget impasse over President Donald Trump demand for a border wall. On Wednesday, he signed legislation authorizing back pay for federal government workers once the shutdown ends.
Yet that doesn’t include contract workers such as Langdon, who asked that his employer not be named.
Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Kevin Hassett said the administration’s new estimate of the shutdown’s cost to U.S. economic output is a reduction of 0.13 percent every week, not 0.1 percent every two weeks as previously estimated.
“We’ve been watching the actual effects, and noticing that the impact that we see on government contractors is bigger than the sort of staff rule of thumb anticipated,” Hassett told reporters on Tuesday.
About 1.2 million government contractors have been ensnared in the shutdown ranging from cooks and custodians to employees of consulting giants like Deloitte LLP and Accenture PLC, according to Paul Light, a New York University professor who studies federal workers.
“What’s driving people nuts in here in the contracting community is the uncertainty,” Light said in an interview.