US Government Shutdown and Foreign Policy consequences
by Professor John Kane
The current partial shutdown of the US government has now run longer than any previous, and the impasse between president and congressional Democrats shows no sign of being resolved soon. But how can something like this even happen?
The possibility exists because an Antideficiency Act (originally 1884, amended 1950) prohibits government agencies from performing non-essential operations in the absence of a legislated appropriations bill to fund the federal government over the coming fiscal year. If Congress fails to pass such legislation, agencies must oblige federal employees in essential services to work without pay, while those in non-essential services must take ‘furlough’ (basically unpaid leave).
Shutdowns occur when the various branches of the US government fail to agree on specific issues. Most have been partial and/or brief but full shutdowns have occurred in the past, including two when President Clinton clashed with congressional Republicans over whether to cut government services, the second lasting 21 days, and one of 16 days during Barack Obama’s administration caused by the failure of Democrats and Republicans to agree on the Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’).
Shutting down the government is thus a threat that can be deployed by parties or president for political purposes.
The current shutdown is however unusual in some respects. It is only partial because Congress pre-emptively passed two ‘minibus’ bills in September 2018 that covered 77% of discretionary funding for fiscal year 2019. The second peculiarity is that the main reason for this shutdown is President Donald Trump’s own fragile ego.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans desired a government shutdown so an incentive existed to make deals to cover the remaining parts of government over the holiday period, with interim bills extending funding into early February. And deals were in fact negotiated, with the main sticking point being the president’s desire to secure funding for his notorious Mexican border wall. Democrats were willing to approve a bill providing $1.6 billion for the wall but Donald wanted $5.7 billion.
Nevertheless, in mid-December 2018 he expressed willingness to sign a bill which would ensure government funding into 2019 even absent agreement on the wall. The Senate thereupon unanimously passed a bill providing funding through to February 8 which House Democrats agreed to support. But then Trump, stung by accusations of cowardice from Right-wing media commentators, reversed his position, dug in his heels and refused to sign any bill that did not include funding for his ‘wall’ (the meaning of wall became increasingly unclear as Trump squirmed and squiggled to find something, anything that would satisfy his ‘base’ that a key campaign promise was being kept). His intransigence ensured a partial governmental shutdown from December 22.
Many Republicans were nervous at the likely effects on their electoral fortunes, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pulled them into line, maintaining the political support that (for his own partisan reasons) he had given the president ever since he was elected. Trump meanwhile, though he had vowed to proudly ‘own’ any shutdown (in a televised meeting with House Speaker-designee Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer), became alarmed at negative polls and predictably tried to shift blame onto Democrats who he said refused his ‘conciliatory’ overtures.
Causes are one thing, but what of consequences? The consequences for affected federal employees, some 800,000 of them, were obvious and immediate: no pay checks meant a struggle to continue paying mortgages and bills and sometimes having to join queues on the food-line. Republicans thought they could wear this on the (probably facile) assumption that federal employees were all Democratic voters anyway, but this remained a negative, especially as tens of thousands of law enforcement officials were among those forced to work without pay. Meanwhile around 4 million small businesses dependent on government contracts were increasingly at risk, while loans from the Small Business Administration were frozen preventing enterprise expansion. Elsewhere federal courts were running out of money, national parks went unmanned (putting visitors at risk, three deaths to this point), the Transport Security Authority began closing security checkpoints because of a shortage of screeners, the Coast Guard went on furlough and the Internal Revenue Service faced a problem addressing tax returns.
To mitigate the damage, the Trump administration redefined the scope of ‘essential services’ to force thousands of employees back to work without pay, but clearly the problems and pressures were bound to mount the longer the stand-off continued (however much Republicans may theoretically extol the benefits of smaller government).
What was the effect of all this on American foreign policy? This is unclear over the short term, though some observations may be pertinent. Ironically, given that Trump’s rationale for the shutdown was his concern for ‘national security’ (that the wall was supposed to ensure), one of the agencies seriously affected was the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Under its aegis falls the Coast Guard and the Transport Security Administration, as well as Border Patrol and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). To be sure, the majority of DHS employees came under the essential services category, but even so some 32,000 employees were barred from working, many in important jobs like management and emergency training.
Perhaps most worrying was the effect on cybersecurity, for the DHS’s shutdown plan included furloughing almost half of the personnel in its recently established Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). CISA issued a statement that it had “ceased a variety of critical cybersecurity and infrastructure protection capabilities”. With the US under daily and increasingly sophisticated attacks from states like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, a reduction of agency activities to “baseline operational capabilities” had to be a cause for grave concern.
The Defense Department was largely unaffected, though tens of thousands of military personnel were required to turn up for work without assurance of pay. The State Department on the other hand was totally unfunded, though many workers were recalled after a fortnight with promises of pay (where the funds were to come from was unclear). Despite this recall, Senator Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, argued that the shutdown “continues to create a real risk for US foreign policy”. Diplomacy would be negatively affected, he said, if officials went unpaid, adding that it was impossible to “hold a government together with duct tape”.
Whatever the negative effects of the shutdown in foreign policy matters, however, any damage done will be overlaid on that already wrought by the administration itself.
The State Department, for example, after having been conscientiously rebuilt under Hillary Clinton, was systematically reduced under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, causing a fall in agency morale to levels not seen since the administration of George W. Bush. State, with all its egghead intellectuals, has always been undervalued and under-resourced compared to the over-muscled Department of Defense, and disdain for diplomacy often means that the military, once placed at the sharp end of events, is forced to take up diplomatic roles for which it is ill-suited. This is a long-term issue in US politics, but professional diplomacy has certainly not been advanced by a president who takes consequential diplomatic initiatives via twitter without significant consultation or advice (Tillerson, remember, was fired in a Tweet).
Tillerson’s replacement, Mike Pompeo, stated on appointment that he wanted State to “get its swagger back”, and renamed it the Department of Swagger, a joke that backfired among many who just wanted a serious and respectable department. Pompeo nevertheless expressed determination to reverse the hollowing out that had occurred under Tillerson, though he was hampered by the fact that so many experienced people had already departed. He was personally highly active diplomatically, his impetus no doubt increased by the fact that he was more ideologically aligned with Trump than Tillerson had been. But when he publically supported Trump’s shutdown, it became apparent that morale at State had not improved under his leadership, quite the contrary. Diplomats were already furious at being forced to work without pay, which seemed, said one, to show “a continued lack of respect, even apparent enmity, for people committed to the national security of the country, only in order to serve a political calculation.” Pompeo’s support for Trump added fuel to the fire, and staffers were further incensed at the secretary’s decision to take his wife on a trip to the Middle East even as diplomats were filing for unemployment benefits.
Pompeo was a beneficiary of the high attrition rate among Trump’s appointees. The general trend was for people who seemed insufficiently loyal to be terminated in favour of others more supportive of Trumpian policies or simply more subservient. Trump was thus progressively freed from moderating forces and enabled to follow his own instincts (his famous ‘gut’, which he said was wiser than most learned heads). At Defense, Jim Mattis abruptly resigned as secretary (Trump would later say he was effectively fired) when Trump, after a conversation with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suddenly announced an intention to withdraw US troops from Syria over the objections of national security advisers. (The fact that Pompeo sought to allay allied fears about the immediacy of withdrawal showed that policy tensions within the administration had not been wholly eliminated.) Mattis’s resignation letter was a virtual critique of Trump’s foreign policy perspectives: praising NATO (an organisation Trump regularly maligned and threatened to withdraw from); affirming the need to treat allies with respect; and warning about the intentions of malign authoritarian rivals and strategic competitors (e.g. China and Russia).
What observers abroad thought of Trump’s shutdown depended on the particular eye of the beholder. For countries like Europe, Japan and Australia it was just one more dispiriting development after two years of a chaotic administration that had demonstrated, at best, ambivalence and, at worst, outright hostility toward traditional allies, with a consequent diplomatic retreat from the liberal leadership role assumed by America since World War II. The self-centred motives informing the shutdown (conciliating the ‘base’) seemed to confirm the fundamental lack of seriousness of the Trump presidency. For rival and competitor nations of an illiberal hue, on the other hand, the shutdown, insofar as it weakened American foreign policy potential, was just one more reason to rejoice. Their bold and building international initiatives, launched well before the advent of Trump, now had an unexpected ally, the president himself, whose every action and whose fundamental attitudes seemed to serve them better than they served any traditional version of American identity and mission.
It has frequently been observed that Trump, though he has long-fixed attitudes about America’s place in the world (“we’re being played for a patsy”), has one overriding imperative − to be always the centre of attention. Whether the notice he gets is favourable or unfavourable hardly matters (though in fact he is supersensitive to criticism, especially if he appears to be ‘not winning’). If the world over which he in important part presides eventually goes to hell in a handbasket, well, why should he care? As he has said: “I won’t be here.” Such fundamental irresponsibility informs the shutdown, the main danger of which lies not in any specific problems it creates but rather in the attitude itself when held by the occupant of the most powerful office in the world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROFESSOR JOHN KANE
John Kane is Professor in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Brisbane.
John attained his PhD at the London School of Economics and and teaches in political theory, political leadership and US foreign policy and is a researcher in Griffith’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy.
He has published widely, been awarded numerous research grants, and four times been Visiting Professor to Yale University. He is the author of The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge UP) and Between Virtue and Power: The Persistent Moral Dilemma of US Foreign Policy (Yale UP). He is also co-author (with Haig Patapan) of The Democratic Leader: How Democracy Defines, Empowers and Limits its Leaders (Oxford UP).
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