A partial government shutdown that could take start as soon as Sunday would require furloughing half of USDA's department's 100,000 workers, and will prevent field offices from doing much more than emergency assistance, officials say.
“Shutdowns are a colossal waste of resources,” USDA's undersecretary for farm production and conservation, Robert Bonnie, told Agri-Pulse.
He said it takes “an enormous amount of resources” just to figure out how to implement a shutdown and then, inevitably, resume operations.
A USDA spokesperson could not say whether payments under the Conservation Reserve Program or commodity programs would be made on schedule during a shutdown, but that answers would be forthcoming in the next few days.
USDA Undersecretary Robert BonnieCongressional leaders are trying to agree on a continuing resolution that could keep the government funded when the new fiscal year starts Sunday. However, it's not clear House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., can unite the GOP conference on a plan, or whether as an alternative he will try to move a CR that has Democratic support.
Senate leaders introduced a bipartisan CR Tuesday that would fund the government through Nov. 17. The Senate then voted, 77-19, Tuesday evening to take up a CR, but it remains uncertain whether the measure would pass the House.
Bonnie said emergency work to help producers recover from disasters, such as is going on in Florida post-Idalia, will likely continue, but most FPAC staff will not be on duty.
He said the department has hired about 300 people to help get Inflation Reduction Act conservation dollars out the door, but that a shutdown will “set us back.”
Nutrition and anti-hunger advocates were among the most vocal critics of a potential shutdown.
“No one who needs WIC should be turned away, ever,” said Kate Franken, board chair of the National WIC Association, which advocates for the Women, Infants and Children program. “Congress must fully fund WIC to avoid any service delivery disruptions and refrain from implementing waitlists for the first time in 30 years. Anything less is indefensible.”
“We cannot waste another moment playing politics with the health and wellbeing of the nearly 6.8 million pregnant and postpartum women and children who rely on our healthy food benefits, breastfeeding support and nutrition education,” she said.
The Biden administration has seized on the possible shutdown to frame House Republicans as irresponsible and untrustworthy, in light of the debt ceiling agreement reached earlier this year that was supposed to prevent such budget disagreements from turning into full-blown crises.
“This is what drives people crazy outside of Washington: when a deal is not a deal and when the work that you're supposed to do doesn't get done, and doesn't get done on time,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at a White House press briefing Monday, decrying not just the potential shutdown but steep cuts in support for WIC made in the USDA/FDA funding bill that the House was slated to consider Tuesday.
“At the time, I said the budget was pathetic, it was punitive, and it was petty. And I would say that that also continues to be the case,” Vilsack said.
“Clearly, during the course of a shutdown, millions of those moms, babes, and young children would see a lack of nutrition assistance,” Vilsack said.
Vilsack and the National WIC Association said it would be only days before WIC begins to run out of money.
The WIC program would come to a halt, Vilsack said, although a contingency fund at USDA may keep things running for a day or two, and a handful of states may have unspent WIC benefits they can distribute.
“The vast majority of WIC participants would see an immediate reduction and elimination of those benefits, which means the nutrition assistance that's provided would not be available,” he said.
SNAP funding, he said, would last through the end of October, after which “there would be some serious consequences."
But the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said that stores that accept SNAP benefits would not be able to renew their Electronic Benefit Transfer card licenses during a shutdown, making them unable to accept SNAP benefits.
About 50,000 USDA employees, or about half of the entire workforce, would be furloughed as the result of a shutdown, Vilsack said.
Farmers would not able to apply for new marketing assistance loans in the event of a shutdown.
“Unfortunately, Farm Service Agency county offices would be closed, so farmers wouldn't be able to apply for loans, although existing loans would be processed,” Deputy Secretary Xochitl Torres Small said in a brief interview with Agri-Pulse.
But Vilsack also said, “It's not just about farm loans. It's about newlyweds who have decided to purchase their first home in a rural small town. Perhaps they're getting a loan guarantee from a bank that is guaranteed by USDA or perhaps they're getting a direct loan from USDA to be able to purchase that home. With a shutdown, those loans don't take place. And it's conceivable in those circumstances [that] not only … are they not able to close the loan, it's also conceivable that they may lose the deal.”
Torres Small said USDA is working to update contingency plans left over from past shutdowns.
“We have to look at our legal authorities for each funding limit” to determine whether or how a program can continue in some fashion during a shutdown, Torres Small. But with programs funded by annual appropriations, with few exceptions, activities must come to a halt.
An exception is for activities to protect life and property.
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The Farm Production and Conservation mission area in USDA, which includes FSA and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, says NRCS classifies Emergency Watershed Program employees, who work on disaster response and construction, and Watershed and Flood Prevention Program employees, who work on “active construction contracts and whose job includes aspects that could have a life and property-related job function) as ‘exempted.’”
Torres Small said that the situation can get complicated when funding may not come from annual appropriations, but is distributed or managed by employees who are. In that case, the funds would stay where they are.
One area where USDA has to be careful not to operate outside the law is in operation of FSA offices. A 2019 Government Accountability Office report found that during the shutdown in 2018, when Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue was in charge, USDA illegally allowed FSA employees to return to county offices.
The FSA “incurred obligations to perform various activities and ultimately recalled employees in all county offices back to work,” GAO said. “FSA lacked available budget authority for these activities.”
Don’t expect to hear from federal employees during a shutdown. They are “not permitted to access government email or use government phones during the period of their furloughed status,” according to the FPAC contingency plan.
However, federal employees will eventually be paid for the time they didn't work.
The Office of Management and Budget estimated that for the 2013 shutdown, which lasted from Oct. 1 to Oct. 17 of that year,, the government paid $2.5 billion to furloughed employees for hours not worked, as well as roughly $10 million in penalty interest payments and lost fee collections, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Shutdowns in 2013, 2018 and 2019 cost the government $4 billion, a Senate report found. And the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the 2018-2019 shutdown “reduced Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by a total of $11 billion, including $3 billion that will never be recovered,” the CRFB said.
“While estimates vary widely, evidence suggests that shutdowns tend to cost – not save – money for several reasons,” the group said. “For one, putting contingency plans in place has a real cost. In addition, many user fees and other charges are not collected during a shutdown, and federal contractors sometimes include premiums in their bids to account for uncertainty in being paid.”
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