There were 2,527 total delays within, into, or out of the US on Tuesday according to flight tracking data. The growing impact on the public was widely cited as spurring an end to the longest-ever government shutdown, over 35 days spanning late 2018-early 2019. Image: Leonard Zhukovsky/Shutterstock.com
About half of the public is “already noticing tangible impacts from the federal government shutdown,” a poll by the Partnership for Public Service has found, and a similar share of respondents said they would be concerned about the impact on their communities “if there are a lot of firings of federal employees during the shutdown.”
“It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone to see just how much of a burden the public is carrying from this completely avoidable shutdown,” the Partnership said. “Even more alarming is that the worst effects for the public are yet to come as the Trump administration pursues additional RIFs and funding cuts in an extremely misguided attempt to use civil servants and government resources as hostages and leverage.”
The growing impact on the public—for example, through delays in air travel, degraded customer service and reduced services at facilities such as parks—was widely cited as spurring an end to the longest-ever government shutdown, over 35 days spanning late 2018-early 2019.
According to a CRS report, the current shutdown now qualifies as the second-longest behind that one. However, in that case, only some federal agencies were affected because appropriations had been enacted for others; the current shutdown affects all agencies and operations without pre-funded accounts or self-financing operations.
Previously, the second-longest shutdown had been for 21 days over December 1995-January 1996, although some agencies had funding in that case, as well (it had been preceded by a five-day government-wide shutdown in November 1995). A shutdown of the first 16 days in October 2013 also was government-wide, apart from some civilian DoD employees who were funded.
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