Donald Trump created the nation’s longest government shutdown, all because someone on Twitter called him a bad name. And in proving how tough he is (before he folded like a damp tissue), Trump created not just massive economic damage to the nation, but generated lingering distrust that affects the government’s ability to both hire workers and effectively meet public needs. As Bloomberg reports, the damage is widespread and will not soon be repaired.
In national parks, not only have delicate ecosystems been damaged and irreplaceable natural features suffered harm, but looters actually made off with one-of-a-kind relics from the nation’s past. Science experiments that took months or years to prepare were abandoned before results could be collected, setting back the clock—and driving up the cost—of research. And after Trump complained in 2018 about how California wasn’t “sweeping” its forests well enough to prevent fires, the shutdown actually caused fire crews to miss their winter season window for conducting controlled burns, increasing the chance of disastrous wildfires across the west in the year to come.
The namesake Joshua trees at Joshua Tree National Park may have suffered the most widely publicized damage, but similar issues happened at parks across the country. That included not just plants and structures destroyed by visitors who took advantage of park personnel’s reduced presence to go off-road in ecologically sensitive areas, but even direct poaching of threatened species. In Florida, sea turtles and manatees were injured by boats roaring into previously closed off areas. In the Badlands, fossils were stolen from trailside exhibits. At sites in both Utah and Colorado, rock carvings made hundreds of years ago were defaced by vandals. Damage has also been sustained in areas around thermal features at Yellowstone and in places where a single footfall leaves a lingering impression for centuries.
Those are mostly physical damage. But the damage to the government, and the nation, goes deeper.
Researchers looking for a place to partner on critical topics from the environment to health got a sharp reminder that the U.S. government under Donald Trump is not a reliable partner. That has not only delayed existing projects, it’s made it much more likely that future science, and future scientists, will look elsewhere.
Those things are not going to be repaired by the issuing of a couple of paychecks—paychecks that the great majority of federal workers have yet to receive.
Conservatives have a solution for this problem. They are already using Trump’s shutdown and its disastrous effects as “evidence” that the government can’t be trusted to take care of these needs. From airport security to park maintenance, they have a solution: privatize the services. Sell off public lands. Hand out private contracts.
But the solution to creating public trust in these services isn’t removing the public. It’s restoring the trust.
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As NPR reports, it has always been difficult to recruit federal workers. The pay for those workers often falls well behind what’s available in the private sector, and in an age where some workers hope to join a company whose value grows explosively … that’s not going to happen with a federal agency. Under Trump, hundreds of workers—and especially skilled experts—have already been dismissed from agencies like the EPA and departments like Energy and Interior. Now the shutdown has demonstrated even to those who remain that they work at the whim of people who really, really do not care about their roles. The only thing that makes many workers elect to forego immediate gratification at a private-sector job is the sense that they are working for the public good, and the promise of decent long-term benefits. Trump has undermined both of those motivations.
As the Atlantic noted in the early days of the shutdown, there is a step that Democrats can take to remediate some of the broad damage that Trump has done, a factor in any deal that is far more important than how many miles of fence Trump gets to build or the exact figure devoted to “border security.”
The legislation coming out of the bipartisan group of legislators could genuinely secure America’s security, in every sense, by simply taking the ability to initiate a shutdown out of Trump’s hands—and out of everyone’s hands. They could include an automatic continuing resolution in any bill that emerges from their discussions. That bill would simply make it clear that when a budget deal is not in the offing … the government continues working.
Automatic continuing resolutions used to be the rule of the day, up until the 1970s, when it seemed that the threat of a shutdown might provide additional leverage in resolving budget negotiations. But four decades’ worth of evidence is that having budget deals fall apart into shutdowns only generates shutdowns, not deals.
The legislation that gets sent to Trump may have some new compromise over how border funds are allocated, but it should have no compromise on the idea that shutdowns are incredibly damaging. Any solution that is a solution must include automatic continuing resolutions.