If the tentative deal to keep the U.S. government open falters, another shutdown could be even worse.
Rainy-day funds have been exhausted, work is still backlogged, morale is low and there’s been no time to analyze the lessons of the last shutdown, according to interviews with current and former federal employees.
Congressional negotiators said Monday night that they had reached a tentative agreement to keep the government open past Friday’s appropriation deadline but President Donald Trump said Tuesday he isn’t happy with it and hadn’t decided to accept it. “I can’t say I’m thrilled,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House.
The most pressing threat to agencies in the event of a second partial government shutdown may be their inability to rely on the same workarounds that sustained them last time.
While some federal agencies were able to tap cash reserves or leftover funds from last year to prolong some activities during the last shutdown, which at 35 days was the longest in history, many of those depleted accounts have not yet been restored.
“Agencies will have exhausted or depleted available carryover funds, so they won’t be able to last for as long,” said Sam Berger, a senior adviser at the Center for American Progress who previously worked for former President Barack Obama.
Instead, agencies would effectively be entering Day 1 of a new shutdown with only the resources they would have had left on Day 36.
Agencies are also trying to winnow a backlog of work that built up during the previous shutdown, much less prepare for a new one. Where government typically enters shutdowns guided by a sense of the resources on hand and necessary work, this time, agencies don’t have the same information.
“Normally you go in knowing your resources on hand, the work that needs to be done, and in this case, they’re still trying to figure those out, after the last shutdown,” Berger said.
There’s another problem facing those agencies: They haven’t had time to analyze what happened during the last shutdown, which ended Jan. 25, and figure out how to apply that analysis to blunt the effects of another halt in funding.