Facing the Facts of Furloughs

EXECUTIVE MEMO

Facing the Facts of Furloughs

fter hitting the snooze button two to three times, braving the cold, the rain, the crowded anarchy of the subway or the highway, you get to work to find a memo posted on the office door: The government has shut down. You are not essential. Go home.

Technically deemed "non-excepted" or "non-emergency," an estimated 800,000 federal employees across the country faced this very scenario last November. With federal funds depleted and the Clinton Administration and Congress unable to agree on a budget plan, the fear of furloughs became a reality. Only those employees whose jobs were essential to preserving health and safety could work.

Anticipating a possible shutdown this past August, Office of Management and Budget Director Alice Rivlin issued a bulletin directing all agencies to develop contingency plans specifying which employees would be furloughed in the event of a shutdown. In November these plans went into effect, and almost half of the federal workforce was sent home for six days. Only a few agencies whose fiscal 1996 appropriations were already enacted were spared the furlough.

Among the hardest hit were the Defense Department (258,000 of 829,000 employees furloughed), the Social Security Administration (61,415 of 66,195 furloughed), Interior (56,000 of 78,000 furloughed), Commerce (25,075 of 37,703 furloughed), and HUD (11,800 of 11,900 furloughed). SSA was unable to process 112,000 applications for benefits. HUD couldn't process more than 10,000 home loans for moderate- and low-income families.

By the time the shutdown ended with a temporary budget deal just before Thanksgiving, President Clinton was about to order more than 50,000 SSA workers back to work to process claims.

That raised the question as to whether much of the public would notice the effects of such shutdowns. And if the answer was no, how could shutdowns be an effective tool to pressure the President and Congress to reach agreement? Such questions were behind a lawsuit filed by the American Federation of Government Employees. AFGE argued that the government violated the Anti-Deficiency Act by requiring many people to work who were not vital to protection of health and safety. U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan denied AFGE's request for a temporary restraining order, but he expressed serious concern for the welfare of federal employees and said he was "troubled" by the government's interpretation of the Anti-Deficiency Act.

In voting to end the shutdown, Congress also granted retroactive pay to the employees who had been furloughed. It cost taxpayers $400 million to pay people who didn't work during the shutdown, OMB calculated.