The US government is currently shut for business, as you've no doubt gathered by now. From my foreign perspective, the government appears to have been forced into a shutdown by a bunch of extremists on the right, who are trying to undo a law that has been on the statute books since 2010, survived more than 40 attempts to repeal it, been declared constitutional by the Supreme Court and was effectively re-mandated by last year's presidential election (* see below).
Instead of spending a bit of time ranting about how bat-shit crazy this is, I'll let John Stewart from the Daily Show do it for me:
Since last weekend, I've started taking more of an interest in US politics and been watching debates in both houses on C-Span. Given the insane rhetoric coming from the Tea Partyists, the first thing that struck me was how orderly and calm the debate from the floor of the House of Representatives seemed to be, on a superficial level, as I'm used to watching the unruly rabble that is the House of Commons in Westminster. Politeness aside, the way bills pass through the House is pretty insane. Unlike the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Speaker of the House of Representatives is very much a partisan position and he/she gets to choose which bills are debated on the floor. The current situation means that, even though many Republicans are actually reasonable people, the Speaker John Boehner (pronounced Baner, apparently) has to pander to the extremists in his party and can't table a budget bill that doesn't have partisan demands (such as defunding Obamacare) without risking his own job, even though there are enough reasonable people in the House to pass such a bill. The net result is that the government has to stay closed until both houses and the president agree on some bill that provides money for the government.
So, I'm writing this blog post from my kitchen table, because the institute I work at is part of the federal government and has now been furloughed. We had to turn up for work yesterday so that we could "phase down" our work in an orderly way and had to be off campus by 12pm. Many businesses in DC have offered bar and food deals to furloughed federal employees (all of us non-essential types), so yesterday was quite good fun. I do appreciate that, as a lowly postdoc working in a science lab, I'm one of the lucky ones as my funding is allocated on an annual basis and I'm not technically a government employee (I work AT the government, but not FOR the government) so I'll still be paid during the shutdown. But this news is not so good for most of the government workers - many of the low-paid workers who actually keep my building running will be sent home until further notice with no guarantee of being paid for the time spent on furlough when the government eventually re-opens. If the shutdown goes on for an extended period of time, federal food programmes for poorer people will start to run out of money, spreading the pain even further. Of course, members of Congress continue to be paid during a furlough.
While the work I do is important, it's not essential - my research means everything to me but no-one will die if I can't do experiments this week. However, being shut out of our labs is still a ridiculous waste of money - a lot of my experiments depend on having mice at the correct age so a huge number of animal lives will be wasted because they can't be used at the appropriate time, which is ethically unacceptable. As I'm not a federal employee, I'm in a bit of a grey area where the furlough might not actually apply to me, but I'm on a temporary visa and the maximum penalty for working during a furlough is a $10,000 fine and up to a year in prison, so I'm going to err on the side of caution here. Technically, we're not even allowed to check work email during a furlough as this counts as working from home. Up until now, I thought the only sure way to make a scientist stop working was to threaten their coffee supply, but even a small risk of arrest and deportation is an amazing disincentive. Not to mention that my route to work involves cycling through a national park, which has also been shut down.
One interesting thing that I've learned about during this is that, because Washington DC is not a proper state, it is only subject to federal laws and, even though the district funded through taxation of those of us who live here, it's not allowed to spend its own money during a government shutdown. Services are still running at the moment because they have some emergency funds, but soon services like rubbish collection could grind to a halt, even though DC has plenty of money in the bank. Thankfully, the DC mayor says that he will keeping things running in spite of congress.
So, what happens next? Well, I'd quite like congress to sort their shit out so that I can get back to work. This could drag on for weeks, though. There's a second crisis just around the corner, when the federal reserve will run out of money in mid-October unless a law is passed that allows it to borrow more money to fund government services. While a shutdown is annoying, I don't even want to imagine what will happen if the US government was forced to default on its debt. Even the extreme right are not that crazy, are they!? I think Churchill got it spot-on when he said "you can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else."
** Update: two bits of essential reading for understanding the furlough: a brutally honest piece from Al Jazeera and an insightful piece from the Atlantic **
(*A bit of background to the US government structure for folks back home: the US government is split into three legislative branches: the Presidency, the Judiciary and Congress, which are all supposed to balance each other. The role of the President is fairly obvious, the Supreme court is used to determine whether laws are constitutional and Congress, split into the Senate and House of Representatives, is the main law-making body. The Senate gives each state equal representation of two senators per state, whilst the number of representatives in the house is allocated to states on a population basis. Wikipedia explains it all rather well. In order for a bill to be signed into law, it has to be approved by both houses and then signed off by the president, who can also choose to veto a law. In principle, this structure should force a situation where no one body can wield undue power and drive through unpopular laws. However, if part of the legislature goes insane, it appears that it can block any bill from passing and bring a government to its knees, as is currently happening.)
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