The federal government wasted $4 billion over the last three government shutdowns, according to a new report, including $3.7 billion that went to federal employees who were sent home and prohibited from working but later granted back pay.
Agencies spent an additional $338 million on administrative work, lost revenue and late fees on interest payments due to the shutdowns, Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Tom Carper, D-Del., found on behalf of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee panel on investigations. The three shutdowns totaled 52 days over the last six years. Federal workers cumulatively spent nearly 15 million days on furlough, which amounted to 57,000 years of lost productivity.
About 350,000 federal employees were furloughed during the record-setting 35-day shutdown that ended earlier this year, while about 850,000 were sent home during the 16-day shutdown in 2013.
The figures in the Senate report actually represent a conservative estimate, as the Agriculture, Defense, Justice and Commerce departments, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, were unable to provide data to the senators. That failure, Portman and Carper said, “raises serious questions about these agencies’ ability to perform any oversight of [their] own employees.” While the Pentagon was unaffected by the more recent shutdown, Defense initially furloughed 400,000 employees in 2013 before eventually recalling virtually all of them. Commerce, Justice, USDA and EPA furloughed 109,000 employees earlier this year, representing more than 30% of the total number of workers sent home.
American taxpayers incur the tab not just from paying feds not to work and other costs associated with shutdowns, the senators said, but also due to the “significant lost productivity costs” and “important functions” that are not performed. The senators noted several such examples, including:
Investigators at Justice, Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, a ..
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