As House Republicans continue to spar over various budget priorities, most of the federal government could shut down on Oct. 1 if Congress fails to pass key spending bills before that deadline.
New York City wouldn’t be spared the consequences: Millions of New Yorkers rely on the U.S. government to pay for groceries or receive a paycheck, and federal resources will be crucial for getting the city’s ongoing migrant crisis under control.
“Anyone who depends on any kind of federal assistance is at direct risk of being hurt immediately,” Democratic City Councilmember Erik Bottcher, whose district includes several neighborhoods on Manhattan’s West Side, said in an interview. “All Americans are going to face this in one shape or form locally.”
While the Republican House majority grapples with internal strife, the Democrat-controlled Senate is likely to reject any spending cuts it deems too extreme. And if the chambers don’t reach an agreement by midnight on Sept. 30 – when the government’s current fiscal year ends – federal agencies from the National Park Service to the IRS to the Department of Agriculture will grind to a halt.
Here’s what New Yorkers can expect, including who’s likely to bear the brunt of a shutdown.
Millions of New Yorkers could lose access to food aid
Depending on how long a government shutdown persists, available funding for certain food assistance programs would dwindle — if not run out.
An estimated 1.7 million people in New York City received benefits from the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, as of 2021, according to the most recent report from the city’s social services department. The number of New Yorkers on SNAP, as well as the population of residents below the federal poverty line, significantly increased due to the economic turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and benefit processing times have significantly slowed.
While SNAP benefits would continue in the short run in a shutdown scenario, the government would eventually run out of money in its reserves to foot the bill in a longer-term situation, said James Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policies at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs.
But the funding for another popular food assistance program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, would run out much sooner, he added. New York City had approximately 206,000 WIC recipients as of 2019, an official report published in 2020 found.
New York “might have reserves to continue WIC payments for a longer period of time than what may be the case in other states,” Parrott said. “But there is concern the payments could end pretty quickly.”
Thousands of federal employees in the city would be furloughed or forced to work without pay
More than 51,000 federal employees work across the state, Gov. Kathy Hochul confirmed this month, and many of them live in New York City. If the government shuts down, some of these workers – those deemed essential based on their job functions – would continue working, but without pay. Others would be furloughed.
While federal employees would receive back pay after a shutdown ends, going without their usual biweekly paychecks would pose a hardship for these people and their families, said Parrott, even as it wouldn’t put a huge dent in the city’s economy.
Parrott added that furloughs would also hamper less-obvious government functions.
“It creates problems with not having the usual data on the unemployment rate, retail sales, and other government indicators. It’ll slow down the spending of government funds for long overdue, much-needed infrastructure projects,” he said.
The White House could be limited in assisting with the city’s migrant crisis
More than 10,000 migrants are entering New York City each month, according to city officials, now that a pandemic-era border measure that once quelled these numbers has expired. And while the federal government is providing some help with managing this influx, local leaders continue to campaign for more resources and temporary work permits for newly arrived migrants.
But a shutdown would diminish the chances of further relief from the Biden administration, according to Murad Awawdeh, the New York Immigration Coalition’s executive director.
“There is an anticipation of additional resources being made available to the [city’s] emergency shelter and food program, [but] I’m not sure if that is going to happen at this point,” he told Gothamist.
Awawdeh noted that because U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services is a fee-based agency that depends on generating revenue, it would operate at a much slower rate if a shutdown occurs. Other federal agencies working on the migrant crisis could also temporarily lose funding, which in turn would jeopardize how much help the city can give new arrivals.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams is currently pushing to restrict a decades-old “right-to-shelter” mandate requiring the city to provide an emergency bed to anyone who requests one. He also recently reduced the amount of time adult migrants can spend in shelters to 30 days, warning that the city would soon have to resort to placing migrant families, including young children, in barracks-style shelters due to lack of space.
Hundreds of disaster-recovery projects would stall across the state
A shutdown would delay more than 200 long-term disaster recovery projects in New York, the White House said on Thursday — even as the impacts of climate change worsen in communities throughout the country.
That’s because a major federal emergency management fund that’s already running dry due to a bout of recent disasters would not be replenished. The fund covers projects like school and home rebuilds following tornados and hurricanes, with hundreds of millions of dollars bankrolling individual recovery efforts stemming from the worst disasters, such as Hurricane Ian last fall.
Additionally, a shutdown would block local fire departments from disaster preparedness funding, “halting first responder training, and jeopardizing access to grants for disaster and terrorism preparedness,” the White House noted in a release.
In total, nearly 2,000 recovery projects across the U.S. and Puerto Rico would be impeded by a shutdown. New York represents more than a tenth of those projects (214), and has the third largest number of projects behind Florida (272) and Louisiana (222).
What New Yorkers should watch for
New Yorkers should keep an eye on the clock. The last federal shutdown, which was the longest in U.S. history, lasted 35 days, from Dec. 22, 2018 to Jan. 25, 2019. It lowered the national GDP and delayed billions of dollars in government spending, according to a 2019 Congressional Budget Office report.
#big #ways #government #shutdown #affect #NYC
