President Trumps unprecedented shutdown ended as it began: as a pointless assault from within on the United States government, workers, economy and security. Five weeks after Trump forced the partial shutdown, he accepted the same deal he could have made without crippling the government he was elected to run.
The agreement will reopen the shuttered agencies for three weeks, pending negotiations on border security, without providing any of the billions for a border wall that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats rightly refused to discuss while the closure continued. It was much the same legislation that the then-Republican-controlled Congress and Trump himself contemplated before Christmas and before a right-wing media outcry pushed the president into a reversal to which GOP lawmakers largely deferred.
Trumps capitulation Friday, clearing the way for back pay to roughly 800,000 federal workers, came as they missed a second paycheck. About half the unpaid employees were deemed essential and had to work, limiting their ability to earn money by other means. The rest were furloughed and will cost taxpayers billions in lost services. Many federal contract workers, meanwhile, will never recover the lost wages.
In inflicting such hardship for 35 days, two weeks longer than the previous record, the administration revealed a callous disregard for those who cant, as Pelosi put it, ask their father for more money. Proving her point, Trump suggested he thought supermarkets would let federal employees buy their groceries on layaway, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said he didnt really quite understand why some resorted to food banks, and White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said furloughed workers were better off.
Hassett acknowledged, however, that the economy was worse off. According to his estimate, the shutdown may have cost more than half a percentage point in economic growth.
With the Homeland Security Department among the affected agencies, the shutdown also senselessly threatened public safety, including the border security that was Trumps supposed goal. FBI Director Christopher Wray called the situation mind-boggling. The gathering strain on air travel forced the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday to restrict traffic into and out of LaGuardia Airport in the presidents native Queens.
Such repercussions may have forced Trump and his enabler, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to relent. Or perhaps the president was motivated by Pelosis cunning cancellation of his appearance before Congress, and on television, for the State of the Union address. There are also the polls showing the public increasingly disapproves of Trumps performance and remains skeptical, despite a pretend border crisis, of his wall.
Trump has absurdly threatened to force another shutdown if he doesnt get his way in the next three weeks, but he has done more than anyone to discredit an already dubious tactic. If any good can come of historys longest shutdown, it will be to consign shutdowns to history.
The San Francisco Chronicle
