In Our View: End the Shutdown

As the government shutdown leaks into its fifth week, the impact continues to mount.

Nearly 1 million federal employees and contractors are going without paychecks — although thousands have been called back to work without pay to help the government keep functioning. President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a bill ensuring that furloughed workers will receive back pay once the shutdown ends.

And White House economists now say the shutdown is having a bigger effect on the national economy than they expected. Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said the shutdown reduces quarterly economic growth by 0.13 percentage point for every week that it lasts — about twice their initial projection.

That projection is no cause for panic, but it wipes out growth that should be taking place and it promises to have lingering consequences. Morten Wendelbo of the American University School of Public Affairs wrote in an opinion piece, “As the shutdown draws on, it increasingly weakens the government’s ability to protect Americans down the road, long after federal workers are allowed to go back to work.”

The impasse has been caused by Trump’s demand that $5.7 billion for a wall along the Southern border be included in a spending bill from Congress. Democrats have refused to acquiesce. It all amounts to a battle of wills that is holding the federal government hostage and threatening the economic gains that have been made during Trump’s time in office.

In truth, it is difficult to understand the urgency of Trump’s demand to fund a wall, regardless of how one feels about the need for such a structure. Border security is, indeed, important. But Republicans had control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first two years of Trump’s presidency; they could have approved $5 billion or $10 billion or $20 billion for a wall at any time. It was only when Democratic control of the House was imminent that the president decided the issue warranted a shutdown of the federal government.

In a Jan. 6 opinion piece for The Columbian, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground, argued: “While I will never call $5 billion a small amount of money, in the context of a $4.4 trillion federal budget it doesn’t seem like a deal-breaker. Until recently, strengthening the borders was something both parties regularly supported without controversy.” If that is the case, Republicans should have provided the funding when they had unfettered control.

Now, the Democratic-controlled House has passed a bill to reopen government services, but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has refused to bring it to a vote in the Senate. Trump is attempting to blame Democrats for the shutdown, an assertion that is absurd.

Locally, the shutdown means that indoor facilities at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site have been shuttered and workers have been furloughed. The same goes for Pearson Air Museum, McLoughlin House, and several other federally managed locales throughout the region. Meanwhile, many federal workers living in Clark County are either off work or working without getting paid in the immediate future. To provide one example, The Columbian reported that the Fort Vancouver site had 24 full-time equivalent workers as of 2017.

The guess is that most Americans have grown weary of hearing about the shutdown, which President Trump says could last “months or even years.” But the need to reopen the government is more urgent than long-delayed funding for a wall.