John,

Congress has until midnight on November 17th to pass a bill to fund the government.

After weeks without a speaker of the House, and less than 10 days to go until the deadline, it is looking more and more likely that government funding might lapse for the first time since 2019.

If it does, Americans across the country would be immediately impacted: Over two million civilian federal workers will face delayed paychecks, roughly four million federal contract workers will likely receive no paycheck at all and countless others will face travel delays, slow customer service response for government programs like Social Security and postponed immigration court cases. Less immediately obvious, however, is the way a shutdown will interfere with government ethics.

The truth is, a government shutdown would be a disaster for government ethics.

Here’s why: during a government shutdown, key agencies are closed or have their workforce decimated, which makes it even harder for us to hold our leaders accountable. Here are a couple of examples:

• FOIA: Among other issues, CREW has relied on Freedom of Information Act requests to uncover the Secret Service’s contact with the Oathkeepers and to investigate federal officials’ responses to the insurrection on January 6th. But processing FOIA requests requires thousands of federal employees. Even when the government is fully funded, FOIA requests often take far longer than they should, leading to a backlog of requests. During shutdowns, agencies are delayed even further and sometimes refuse to accept requests entirely.


• Inspectors general: Our government has systems in place to investigate allegations of misconduct by government officials. But if the staff is furloughed in inspector general offices across the government, that gets in the way of investigations and accountability.


• Congressional ethics: During a shutdown, the Office of Congressional Ethics may also furlough staff, which could interfere with investigations into complaints, like the one CREW recently filed against Representative Andrew Clyde.


• FEC: If the government shuts down, the Federal Election Commission will also be severely limited in its capacity to enforce campaign ethics laws. That means the FEC will cease enforcement of the Federal Election Campaign Act, and investigations into dark money complaints will be paused. And the FEC will be unable to provide guidance to campaigns about campaign finance laws, just as candidates have begun ramping up their campaigns ahead of the 2024 election.

Thanks,

Noah Bookbinder
President
CREW