Government Shutdown? 83% of the Government is Still Operating

Only in Washington, DC and with politicians does a government shutdown mean that 83% of the government is still operating. As stated ta the Independent Review journal, despite the off-the-wall rhetoric about “blowing up the economy,” taking “hostages,” and politicians with bombs strapped to their chests, 83% of the government is still operational. That is hardly what I refer to as a shutdown.

Everyone knows the phrase “government shutdown” doesn’t mean the entire U.S. government is shut down. So in a partial government shutdown, like the one underway at the moment, how much of the government is actually shut down, and how much is not?

One way to measure that is in how much money the government spends. In a conversation Thursday, a Republican member of Congress mentioned that the military pay act, passed by Congress and signed by President Obama at the beginning of the shutdown, is actually a huge percentage of the government’s discretionary spending in any given year. And that is still flowing. So if you took that money, and added it to all the entitlement spending that is unaffected by a shutdown, plus all the areas of spending that are exempted from a shutdown, and added it all together, how much of the federal government’s total spending is still underway even though the government is technically shut down?

I asked a Republican source on the Senate Budget Committee for an estimate. This was the answer: “Based on estimates drawn from CBO and OMB data, 83 percent of government operations will continue.