Federal agencies have finished updating their shutdown contingency plans should a funding lapse occur, although it appears they will not have to be put into effect starting Thursday as once seemed likely.
Congress is moving to extend agency funding until December 11, a continuing funding bill of the sort that commonly has been passed when the end of a fiscal year approaches with no regular appropriations in effect for the new budget year. An outside chance of a shutdown starting Thursday remains, since there are always potential hangups in the legislative process, but there is a general expectation that the bill will pass by the midnight Wednesday deadline.
Those documents outline which functions have separate funding and thus can continue and which will be unfunded, and make a further distinction for the latter category of which functions must continue due to protection of health, safety, property or other considerations. That in turn determines which employees would be kept on the job and which would be furloughed—in both case unpaid, at least for the meantime.
This year brought the most serious prospect of a failure to pass such a bill in many years apart from two years ago when a lapse actually occurred and many federal functions were shut down for more than two weeks.
Because no such shutdown had occurred since the Clinton administration prior to 2013, agencies at that time scrambled to update their plans. This time the updating task was not as extensive since agencies had done the same only two years before. OMB further had told agencies last year, and again several months ago, to review their plans and revise them if needed. Most of the plans were publicly released Friday by OMB and in some cases by the individual agency, as well.
While the plans do not specify numbers of employees, they do describe distinctions by operation and thus are valuable guides for managers to not anticipate what might happen should a serious shutdown threat occur again—which could happen in as little as two months.
