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Federal Agencies Roll Out Plans For Potential Shutdown
Topic Started: Sep 27 2015, 03:48 AM (37 Views)
Webster
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Wasatch Storyteller & Resident Forum Curmudgeon
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MSN News: Federal Agencies Roll Out Plans For Potential Shutdown

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Even as news late Friday of House Speaker John A. Boehner’s resignation dimmed the likelihood of a government shutdown on Oct. 1, federal agencies put out their contingency plans for a closure anyway.

These are the blueprints that every federal office will follow if Congress does not manage to pass a stopgap spending bill to fund the government when the new fiscal year starts Thursday.

And while that possibility seems remote now that Boehner’s departure removes a threat from his party’s conservative wing to topple him over funding for Planned Parenthood, the ideological conflict over abortion will probably be back on the table in mid-December, when the temporary budget expires.

As the conflicts in Congress played out in recent weeks, managers at every federal agency spent much of their time poring over their roster of employees to decide whether the jobs they do should be considered essential to security and safety or expendable during a shutdown.

“We’re hearing there will be a resolution,” said one Defense Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about contingency planning.

“But we can’t count on that,” the official said. “We have to prepare for all three contingencies: a new budget, a temporary budget without new money, or a shutdown.”

Most agencies relied on the plans they drew up in 2013, when another conflict in Congress, over the Affordable Care Act, forced a 16-day partial shutdown.

For example, the field staff at the Agriculture Department would continue inspections of meat, poultry and eggs. Veterans’ hospitals would stay open.

But all national parks and historical sites would shut. And the Internal Revenue Service “would halt taxpayer services such as responding to taxpayer questions, including telephone customer service functions,” its plan says.

The Park Service added an additional closure this year that it didn’t make in 2013: special events. Any event that calls on employees for crowd control will be canceled.

But Park Service officials also added new language for First Amendment demonstrations on the National Mall, the memorials and Independence National Historic Park in Philadelphia, which could take place as long as the participants obtained a permit before the shutdown.

Wheelchair-bound elderly veterans pushed aside barricades to tour the World War II Memorial in defiance of the shutdown in 2013, which closed all of the memorials in Washington.

The four busloads of veterans, visiting from Mississippi as part of a once-in-a-lifetime Honor Flight tour, ignored police admonitions not to enter the memorial, as lawmakers and tourists cheered them on.

A Park Service service spokeswoman told Federal News Radio that those kinds of tours would probably be covered by the First Amendment exception.

....thoughts?
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