Good evening
and thanks for joining us day 16 of the partial government shutdown day two of
negotiations between the administration
And congressional staff and the president says he doesn't expect much progress this weekend on his way to meetings at Camp David this morning
President Trump told reporters he believes the
800,000 federal workers and contractors
Going without pay will be able to manage I can relate and I'm sure that the people that are or the receiving end will
Make adjustment. They always do on his return this afternoon
The president again said he might declare a national emergency to get the wall built and said he has new instructions for his staff
I informed my folks to say
That we'll build a steel barrier steel
Joining us now from Washington DC is Damien Paletta, White House economic policy reporter for The Washington Post. Damien
Let's talk about to this as we head into week three
What are the kind of longer-term
concerns about what's gonna be funded and what's not? This week will be a very important one because Friday is the first paycheck that
800,000 American federal workers are gonna miss. That's the first paycheck, you know the fruit of their furloughed status
They will not get paid and so that's gonna have an immediate impact on that
Just those 800,000 people but also on their family members and of course the government contractors who also are not getting paid
So that's kind of the near-term pain we're expecting this week
And then as we slip into February, you know some more, you know monumental things happen
whereas food stamp money is expected to run out for 38 million Americans and
Also the IRS and the Treasury Department right now are scrambling to figure out what they can do for those
Forty million or so people who are planning to file their taxes in February and are expecting huge tax refunds
As it stands now those will not be paid until this is sorted out
So there's a lot of things that are happening quickly and this is going to begin snowballing politically for the White House.
So the US Department of Agriculture is the one that administers the food stamps, right?
I mean we're talking about not people they're living for free on this with these people working people. They're getting benefits
What kind of impacts are they likely to see and how do we prioritize who gets the limited funds?
So yeah, the Department of Agriculture runs this program
There's 38 million recipients. A lot of them are children
a lot of them are elderly people the that they rely on for their their food and
There's never been a situation before where the money has been cut off
You know
It's always kind of reappropriation by Congress in a bipartisan way
because this impacts people in every state and so I think what they're wrestling with right now is whether they just
You have to give a haircut to everyone, you know
You only get 60 percent of the money you're supposed to get because that's the reserves they have for one month and after February there
Would be no money or do they, you know reapportioned it so that just the elderly would get you know
The money and everyone else will get cut off. They haven't sorted that out yet
But these are the things as this shutdown drags on
they're trying to resolve they didn't anticipate it was go as long as it has and when it comes to the IRS most of the
IRS is furloughed right now and the people who file early are likely the people who are going to get refunds, right?
Absolutely. Yeah, if you if you were getting a text if you owe money, you kind of wait till the last minute in April
but if you're getting a refund you file early and the earliest you could file last year was January 29th. Last February of
2018, a hundred and forty billion dollars in tax refunds that's billion with a B was paid out in the month of February
As of the IRS is planned last year during a shutdown
They would not pay any tax refunds while Congress has not funded their agency
and so we're in a situation now where they have to decide do we not put that money out back to the taxpayers like
140 billion dollars or do we reverse ourselves and possibly a you know?
Legally dicey decision and pay that money out, even though we have a skeleton staff that maybe isn't able to kind of check
You know the dots and dot the i's and cross the t's so that all those things are happening
You know at a frenetic pace right now because like I said, they did not expect it to get to this point
Yeah
We should remind viewers that those
140 billion dollars in taxes or all of that money that goes through food stamps that has a ripple effect on the grocery stores that
Don't get the money or most people don't just put it on their savings account
They turn around and spend it for the needs that they have, you know
You and your colleagues have also been writing about the park service. What's happening there? Yeah, it's really interesting
So during shutdowns, even though the national parks is kind of a small part of the federal budget
They become the public face of the shutdown because so many Americans go visit national parks, you know Statue of Liberty et cetera
And so right now we've seen is the first major reversal by the White House during the shutdown
they have reversed themselves and are planning to reopen parts of the parks that had been closed and add staffing because it was getting
Unsustainable the amount of trash that was piling up, you know the bathrooms that were you know
Getting very unsanitary and so they're gonna try to add staff back using the fees
They collect from people that are entering these parks now
It was deemed, you know, just a week ago that they could not legally do that
Because you're not allowed to use the entrance fees to pay the staff and things like that that has to be appropriated by Congress
But they've decided that they need to do that. They have to do that
And so we're expecting a political fight over that as well. But that's what I'm trying to say
These are the sorts of you know, flash decisions are trying to make to minimize, you know
the impact of the shutdown but a lot of these things are unprecedent and never been tested and you know,
It's unclear how it'll work. Right Washington Post's Damien Paletta joining us from Washington tonight. Thanks so much. My pleasure. Thank you
