Full disclosure: I've worked on the private industry side of the Federal Government for 20 years. I want to talk about what this looming shutdown really means for Federal workers based on my own personal experience - but I'm going to have to be very careful not to name my customers' Federal Agency, so do bear with me. Further, if you're one of the people who knows who my actual employer is, PLEASE don't mention them by name. I need to keep this as clean as possible from a professional perspective.
More over the fold.
My customer is, today, in turmoil. They are a major cabinet-level agency that would be considered citizen-critical in terms of the services they provide back to the American people. I'm on site with them one to two days a week, and since the new calendar year dawned and the first continuing resolution (CR) was coming to an end, the idea of a shutdown has entered our conversations at a regular basis.
Before I even go there with respect to any shutdown, let me back up and talk about the ramifications of the series of CR's that Federal agencies have received.
Imagine if you were running a business and you were trying to grow that business - to plan, strategically, for what would be required of your business in the near term (12 months) and long term (5 years or more) - yet you only knew in 1 to 3 weeks increments what your budget would be. You can certainly see your workload increasing as you project out over time. But you have no idea whether or not or when you might have money to hire people to accommodate your growing workload. You have projects planned to help with that workload as well - but the 1 to 3 week budget you receive is only a "lights on" type of effort. In other words, you get enough money to pay your people and to do things that were already in progress during the last year - but you can't move forward on any of the other projects that you had planned to help with what's inevitably coming down the road, CR or not, shutdown or not.
That's the environment under which my customers - many of whom I count as friends - are laboring.
So let me talk a little bit about the people I deal with on a daily basis. I call on people at all levels of government, all the way up to Senior Executive Service (SES). The muckety-mucks - SES types - make between $117K and $177K. Not too shabby. I would guess that they aren't stressing a shutdown financially for two reasons: first, they make a good living and are less likely to live paycheck to paycheck; second, as SES folks, they are likely to be deemed "critical" and won't be furloughed in the first place. Similar story with the higher-level non-SES types (GS-15s). They make between $98K and $127K.
On a daily basis, though, I would say that I likely deal mostly with GS-9's to GS-12's. Their pay ranges from $40K to $77K. In the DC Metro area, that's actually not a lot of money. These folks are much more likely to live paycheck to paycheck. Some of them are the sole earner in their household - they have children in college. In other words, life is going to go on and the bills are going to keep coming in regardless of what Congress does.
This second group of people - the ones with whom I interact most frequently - have been a lot more concerned about the possibility of a shutdown. Remember - this has been going on in 1 to 3 week increments for months now. As a result, they aren't spending extra money. They're holding onto it because they're deeply concerned they're going to need it if the government is shut down for even a week (think about it - if you live paycheck to paycheck and you are furloughed without pay for even a week, you've lost 25% of your monthly income).
The stress on them is obvious.
I was around during the last government shutdown. We had a big Federal conference going on - FedUNIX - at the old DC Convention Center (which is now torn down). It was quite the scene. These were the high-flying mid-90s. It was a GREAT time to work in IT, and IT software companies were rolling BIG TIME. We had all of this conference center space and each vendor had these huge, lavish booths with fabulous chotchkeys to give away to all the Feds that would be rolling through. We had booked separate "lounges" for cocktail receptions after the exhibitions closed. Needless to say - it was a bunch of vendors, bored, trading useless free crap and drinking each other's liquor for three days.
At one of these receptions, a particularly idiotic management type from one of the exhibiting companies struck up a conversation with me. He had been brought in by his company's Federal team from their HQ somewhere out in the midwest to give a little "welcome and blah blah" talk at a reception his company was hosting. He didn't personally have any Federal experience. At the cocktail reception, he regaled me with how great it was that the Government was shut down, how they were all lazy people who did very little work and how it could stay shut down and he just bet that no one would actually notice.
What he also didn't notice was the deathray knife-stab look I was giving him. My father was a career civil servant, recruited out of college to work for the General Services Administration. From there he went to the Geological Survey, and then up the food chain to main Interior. He worked his ass off - worked long hours with very little support because the job was there but there was never really enough budget to staff the job well enough to actually get it done. So he and his team worked extra to ensure things went how they were supposed to go. The folks I deal with in my customer base are the same way. They get the job done - they work hard, come in early, attend to a lot of crap, get very little thanks, and carry the burden of too much work and not enough people on their backs just like the rest of us in private industry often do.
Now, on top of months of CR and a looming shutdown and all the financial uncertainty and stress that creates, these folks get to hear about how useless they are, how little value they add to the public, and how they are a greedy, large child feeding off the public breast to the detriment of other (who? Don't know.) people. It hurts me to see them struggle. And for nothing.
They get to worry about paying their bills and having the work they do respected because Republicans want to ensure that wealthy people don't have to suffer the indignity of a tax increase. They get to hear about what drains they are on the economy so that some fundie fuckwad can try to eviscerate Planned Parenthood. They get to spend their weekend not knowing if they'll get back pay if they are furloughed so that Paul Ryan can further his cause. All the while, they aren't spending money over this worry. That's 2.65 million of our fellow Americans (source) - almost 2% of all working people - who are worried about their paycheck and have the bonus of being told that they are unvalued pieces of shit.
As I type this, I can tell you that the people I deal with every day don't know whether they'll be working or not. They don't know what they might need from me to help if a shutdown does occur. They won't know this until tomorrow. That will leave them one working day to get into place what they need to keep everything from going to hell in a handbasket.
I've heard all the commentary about blaming this on last year's Congress or blaming this on the Senate of this year or blaming it on Obama. But I know where the blame lies - it lies with the Tea Party - the ignorant, facts-be-damned, let's-rewrite-history, lower-taxes-create-jobs, Obama-is-a-Kenyan-Muslim-and-he's-BLACK, keep-your-government-out-of-my-Medicare, government-does-do-a-single-good-thing Tea Party. They enjoy relatively small support in the great scope of things (only 25% of Americans characterize themselves as "supporters" of the Tea Party "movement") - but it's just enough support to have allegedly non-Tea Party Republicans by the short hairs. Amid the chants of "SHUT IT DOWN", the Tea Party "Patriots" wring their hands with glee at the great "point" that will be made if the government shuts down.
And with it, 2% of working Americans will tighten their belts, listen to their role in American life be excoriated, and seriously dial back their own financial contribution to economic recovery.
Bravo, Republicans. They're your monster - YOU deal with it.