Can Congress Stop Trump From Shutting Down Govt Again
How to End Government Shutdowns, Forever
Congress should finish relying on one-off funding extensions to keep the government running.
About the author: Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Equally the 3rd government shutdown of the Donald Trump presidency drags on, the miserable effects are piling up. Federal workers, hundreds of thousands of whom are furloughed, are struggling to pay their bills and picking up temporary gigs to make ends encounter; the Function of Personnel Management has encouraged them to bargain with their creditors and offer to exercise chores for their landlords. Contractors working in federal buildings are worse off, likely never to be made whole for their lost shifts. Taxpayers accept lost access to everything from loans to museum tours, and businesses are complaining virtually the uncertainty emanating from Washington.
It doesn't have to exist this way. At that place are many paths to catastrophe the shutdown—Trump could sign a funding bill without coin for his edge wall, say, or with paltry coin for his border wall. Better yet, Congress could shut downward the government-shutdown option, forever.
Information technology could do this past implementing something called an automatic-continuing-resolution provision, which legislators from both sides of the alley take advanced numerous times over the past 30 years. Correct now, when Congress cannot agree on how to spend coin, it passes a standing resolution, or CR, which continues federal agencies' financing for a given menses of time. Automatic CRs would absolve Congress from the responsibility of passing new CRs, preventing both quick financing lapses and big, painful shutdowns.
The motion would prevent the Senate from shutting down the government over disagreements with the Firm, Republicans from shutting down the authorities over disagreements with Democrats, and the White House from shutting down the government over disagreements with Congress. Money would just keep flowing at a steady rate, until Congress were to pass a formal budget or appropriations bill and the president were to sign it.
For all that, the change would be marginal, non radical. Federal police force already bars much of the government from endmost up shop when financing lapses. And CRs are already a common, necessary part of the upkeep process: Congress has used them more 100 times in recent decades, with CRs keeping the regime open up for full years a few times. Several states have automatic-CR-type provisions, and President Barack Obama signed a military-only automatic CR into law back in 2013.
The case for automatic CRs is straightforward: Shutting down the government is a painful, irresponsible, and stupid thing. Granted, the macroeconomic effects tend to be modest, just they are non invisible and they are avoidable. Shutdowns have the potential to increase the jobless rate, crash-land upward borrowing costs, and boring downwards growth. The worst hurting is saved for the hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contractors affected, sometimes over and over once more. Shutdowns mean lost wages mean evictions, higher interest payments, repossessed cars, and the like.
There is also the fact that voters tend to detest shutdowns, and want Congress to make deals to keep the authorities upward and running. For good reason. Voters pay taxes that help finance a suite of services. Shutdowns deny voters those services. Right at present, volunteers are desperately trying to go along the bathrooms clean at Joshua Tree National Park and human waste is piling up in Yosemite; the Smithsonian museums and National Zoo have closed; it is impossible to go a marriage license in Washington, D.C.; and entrepreneurs are waiting on their Modest Business Administration loans. The longer the shutdown lingers, the worse the effects: late tax rebates, canceled contracts, problems with public housing, then on.
Granted, politicians do pass CRs in a timely fashion much of the time. And while voters don't like shutdowns, they don't tend to hate them enough to punish the politicians responsible at the polls. For that reason, along with the leverage that shutdowns requite politicians over ane another and the motivation they give both sides to broker a deal, they tend to happen again and again.
Moreover, getting rid of the threat of a government shutdown might make the appropriations process worse, with Congress doing even less budgeting since the cost of declining to compromise would be lower. The Hill might leave the budget on autopilot for years at a fourth dimension, never coming to an agreement on how to shape, update, and improve the services that Washington provides. A stuck-in-time upkeep would choke off the necessary, natural expansion of federal spending as the country gets bigger and inflation eats at the dollar.
At that place are too legal and procedural barriers to implementing automatic CRs. Reams of federal police prevent the authorities from spending money that has non been appropriated by Congress, after all. Just decades of government memos and proposals from members of Congress suggest that such obstacles are not insurmountable.
All the counterarguments need to be weighed against the inanity and pain caused by the current system. The annual budget process has broken down. The past few shutdowns have happened during a fourth dimension of unified government. In this climate, it has become critical to improve Congress's own processes, and to accept away its power to injure the economy. One fashion to exercise that might exist by ending government shutdowns once and for all.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/how-end-government-shutdowns/579331/
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