Thousands of Hoosier jobs are at risk as the deadline to avoid a government shutdown approaches.
Unless House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R) can find a compromise to keep the government running, a shutdown would begin on Oct. 1 and cause disruption of some federal services.
According to Andrew Butters, an associate professor in the Business Economics and Public Policy Department at IU, most Hoosiers wouldn’t immediately feel the effects of a government shutdown.
“There are going to certainly be some government services where basically, if you're an employee providing that service or rely on that service, whether that be again, to get to and from work or other services, those are going to be the most dramatically impacted with the shutdown,” he said. “For the most part, pretty locally, it's going to be kind of sector to sector specific.”
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More than 3.5 million federal employees and military personnel are at risk of being furloughed or forced to work without pay, depending on the nature of their jobs. Twenty-four thousand of those employees are based in Indiana in cabinet-level agencies such as the Department of Veteran Affairs, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Labor.
Members of Congress would continue to get paid in the event of a shutdown.
Another thing Butters noted, the impact of a government shutdown is heavily dependent on how long it lasts.
“There have been times in the past where it's been a very short-lived shutdown, where largely speaking, it would be very much unnoticed in terms of what services were affected,” he said. “If it was more prolonged, then obviously those impacts will be larger.”
Butters is on the fence as to whether the government will shut down next week, but personally remains hopeful of a compromise.
“I think the safest answer is it's really hard to tell,” he said. “It certainly seems that the dialogue and sort of discussions that are coming out of DC don't paint a great picture.”
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