ANALYSIS: On-the-Ground with the Shutdown
The shutdown is being felt most by furloughed federal employees. The 7th District has the second highest concentration in Virginia. What they're facing, and the groups lining up to help them.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Editor’s Note: If your organization is taking steps to assist furloughed employees, please email Martin Davis so that we might relay that information to our readers.
With no gate to limit access to the Chancellorsville Battlefield in Spotsylvania, cars still flow off of Route 3 toward the Visitors Center. Runners’ and walkers’ cars still occupy the parking slips. And dogs and their owners still walk Bullock Road and the trails that crisscross the site.
But the Visitors Center is dark, as the Park Rangers who oversee the facility are now furloughed.
This is the public-facing reality of Washington’s leaders’ failures to come to an agreement on the budget.
As fallouts go, it’s relatively minor. An inconvenience, to be sure, but a darkened Visitors Center is more a reflection of government dysfunction than a public crisis.
The more-painful piece of the shutdown is happening largely out of sight right now, and the impact is affecting far more people than most are aware.
In Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management estimates that roughly 55,000 people — about 13% of all employed people in the 7th — are federal civilian employees. That’s the second highest in the state. District 8 at 16% is the highest.
How many of those in the 7th District will be furloughed cannot be determined, as not all federal agencies release the same numbers of people.
The New York Times reports that five agencies — Environmental Protection Agency, Education, Commerce, Labor, and Housing and Urban Development — are furloughing more than 70% of their work forces. Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Treasury are furloughing less than 5%.
Nonetheless, a significant number of people in our region are temporarily without a paycheck.
“It is disruptive for families,” said one federal employee who spoke to the Advance on the condition of anonymity. “There’s a lot of uncertainty with the talk of firings and mass firings. It upends the lives of a lot of folks who get up every day to serve the American people and find themselves in the middle of a partisan dispute.”
It’s also concerning for organizations that will be called upon to help these families bridge the gap between paychecks.
Dan Maher, CEO of the Fredericksburg Regional Food Bank, told the Advance via email on Wednesday that: “our most immediately anticipated concern will be the food security of those federal employees who are not being paid. We expect that even a brief shutdown may lead to demand for food resources or SNAP benefits enrollment among those affected workers.”
That’s in the short run. If this shutdown drags on for a month or more, Maher says t could “affect our services.”
He notes that people with SNAP benefits could see delays in funds being loaded to their cards, and “federal food resources scheduled for delivery to food banks might become delayed or postponed, making it challenging to meet demand for our support services, especially if that demand is higher than usual.”
Financial groups that cater to federal employees are preparing to assist federal employees who are furloughed.
According to a story in the Washington Business Journal, “Several financial institutions, including Navy Federal Credit Union and PenFed Credit Union, are offering paycheck assistance, interest-free personal loans and lines of credit to federal workers who need them amid the shutdown. Some are also waiving penalties for early withdrawals from retirement accounts or allowing affected customers to skip a loan payment or two.”
Stay with the Advance as we continue to cover how the federal shutdown is affecting families in our readership area.
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