One of our contracts is to operate the EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Hotline and work with EPA’s subject matter experts to update the online knowledge base. During the 2013 shutdown, the hotline was deemed non-essential.Do we lay off employees? If we lay off employees and they find another job, how do we train new employees in time to restart the hotline?
If we don’t lay off employees and
Incur indirect employee costs, will we go bankrupt? What about the monthly payments for the PBX system, equipment, and software used? We have contracts with these vendors, and we can’t just shut down. OPP reassigned most of the hotline staff to contracts deemed “essential” or funded outside the government. After a week of overhead with no end in sight, we laid off one employee.
We hired her back after the shutdown
EPA reimbursed us for our cash costs, but that was only a fraction of the total revenue the company would have received if it had kept the overseas chinese in worldwide data hotline and knowledge base open, as Congress required in the Safe Drinking Water Act. Unemployment insurance for OPP increased.
The employee we laid off—unsettled by
The experience—quickly found another job lexicon of retail audits and brand standards outside of government contracts and left the company. The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that the government shutdown reduced real GDP growth in the fourth quarter by about 0.1%.3%. The White House Council of Economic Advisers noted that the shutdown has hindered the creation of 120,000 new jobs.
Those numbers probably don’t take
Into account the lost productivity of government rich data workers and their contractors, who are busy figuring out how to cope with the shutdown instead of getting their jobs done. It certainly doesn’t take into account the stress. Nor does it take into account the resentment that “essential” federal workers have to work while “non-essential” workers get 16 days of paid vacation. According to Wikipedia, the government has shut down 18 times since 1976.