Ten Senate Democrats joined Republicans on Friday to pass a funding bill and narrowly avert a federal government shutdown, just hours before the deadline.
The outcome saved Black Americans — who are overrepresented among federal workers — from bearing the brunt of the furloughs, diminished services, and general chaos that likely would have ensued during a shutdown. But the funding bill that Congress adopted also contains some bitter medicine for Black America.
The bill cuts some $13 billion in nondefense spending, reducing spending for workforce training and treatment for substance abuse and mental health issues.
In addition, the bill could slash $1.1 billion of the approved Washington, D.C., budget, devastating the heavily Black city’s services, though the Senate passed a separate bill on Friday that would nullify this cut if the House passes it.
Here’s what you need to know about the near shutdown.
Why were Democrats divided over the spending bill?
Democrats were deeply divided over how to respond to the Republican-sponsored spending bill. As disruptive as a shutdown would’ve been, many voters wanted Senate Democrats to oppose the legislation, which passed the House on Tuesday with one Democratic vote (Rep. Jared Golden of Maine).
They pointed out that the bill lacks specific funding directives and would essentially give President Donald Trump and Elon Musk carte blanche to further decimate the federal workforce.
Democratic supporters of the bill argued that not passing it — and allowing the government to shut down — would only help Trump to make more drastic and arbitrary cuts to the federal workforce.
When does a shutdown happen?
Before a fiscal year begins, Congress is required to pass a bill to fund ongoing federal government programs and operations. That process, however, often crumbles. When it does, Congress passes a shorter-term bill — a “continuing resolution” — to keep the government funded. The most recent one expired this week; Congress was negotiating a bill to keep the government funded and open through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
A shutdown occurs when those negotiations fail.
Though essential employees — think law enforcement officers and air traffic controllers — remain on the job, most federal workers are furloughed until the impasse ends. And none are paid until lawmakers cut a deal. This situation strains the finances of people who live paycheck to paycheck, though in this instance, many voters felt that the bill was bad enough to warrant a shutdown.
Notably, senior citizens continue to receive their Social Security payments, since the program is considered mandatory spending and isn’t funded via short-term appropriations bills, as economists told CNN in 2023.
How could a shutdown impact Black federal workers?
Black workers are overrepresented in the federal government, making up 13% of the total U.S. population, but nearly 20% of the federal workforce.
In the short term, the effects of a shutdown on government services might not have been too noticeable to the wider public, explained Michael Neal, a senior fellow in the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute. But if the government closed for several weeks or more, Americans would have really started to see the impact.
When the government shutters, Black federal employees struggle more than their white peers to replace their missing income.
“In my experience, there are far fewer African Americans in the higher grades,” Cheryl Monroe, who launched her federal employment career at the Internal Revenue Service in 1987, told The Associated Press in 2019.
“White people have the more lucrative jobs in the government,” she added. “They are able to save, able to put money away for six months or a year’s worth of salary. It’s harder for Black people. We’re always starting at the bottom.”
Not only would Black workers have been hit the hardest, but they also wouldn’t have had “as much savings, on average, to replace their lost income,” Neal said, referring to the fact that Black households have less emergency savings than their white counterparts.
On average, white households have $8,100 in liquid assets, while Black households have $1,500, according to 2019 data. Further, fewer Black households say that they can get money from family or friends during a crisis.
Why are Black Americans overrepresented among federal workers?
Since Franklin D. Roosevelt, nearly every president has issued executive orders or enacted laws that have together expanded federal worker and contractor protections against discrimination and created affirmative action programs to boost diversity in the federal workforce and confront the country’s legacy of anti-Black racism.
Because of these efforts, Black Americans have seen “public service employment [open] up economic opportunities for good, well-paid jobs,” wrote Farah Z. Ahmad, a former senior policy analyst at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, in a 2013 report. “The competitive pay scales of government employment have lifted generations of Black people into the middle class.”
Have shutdowns happened before?
The federal government has shut down 21 times, according to a USA Today review. Though the country has seen these events before, the threat of them has become more regular over the past decade.
This greater frequency stems in part from the fact that lawmakers — especially Republican lawmakers — have embraced shutdowns as a tool for political obstruction and campaigning, as Vox’s Li Zhou explained in 2021.
Before 2013, she said, a shutdown hadn’t occurred in more than 10 years. But following the rise of the Tea Party movement during former President Barack Obama’s first term, Republican legislators used the tactic to rail against the Affordable Care Act.
“In the process, GOP lawmakers successfully made their opposition to the law clear, though they eventually caved and funding for the ACA passed. That opposition became an important part of the party’s midterm messaging in 2014, however, a year in which they successfully regained control of the Senate and kept the House,” she wrote.
Neal told Capital B that he wonders how ballooning unpredictability might affect Black workers, who’ve long seen federal employment as something of a haven from the hiring discrimination that can plague the private sector.
It used to be that a federal government job was a safe job, he explained. People gave up the really high levels of income that they could get in the private sector in exchange for the stability and better quality of life that federal employment offered.
“But if you’re starting to see greater volatility — one moment you’re working, the next you’re furloughed and not sure when your next paycheck is coming — that might make people pause,” Neal said. “They might ask if a federal government job is actually going to give them the lifestyle they’re looking for.”
