The Smell of Shutdown: What Really Happens When Government Stops

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spk_0 On this edition of FedGov today with Francis Rose, not every shutdown implication is mission

spk_0 critical.

spk_0 After the 2018-19 shutdown, which was the longest in history, went 34 days, we came back

spk_0 in and we knew as soon as we stepped off the elevators you could smell that the food

spk_0 in the refrigerator and some of them had not been cleaned out.

spk_0 Former director at GAO, Chris Mim, on FedGov today in just a moment.

spk_0 You're getting guidance and advice on managing in the federal government during the shutdown

spk_0 on the FedGov today podcast every day as long as the government is closed.

spk_0 Leaders who have dealt with past shutdowns and past restarts will help you prepare for

spk_0 what's ahead while the government is closed and when it reopens.

spk_0 To make sure you don't miss any of those shows, follow the FedGov today podcast on Apple

spk_0 podcast, Spotify, YouTube, and any place else you get you shows and you can listen on

spk_0 demand anytime at FedGovToday.com.

spk_0 Today's day seven of the federal government shutdown and a set of leading practices are

spk_0 informing the way that leaders can go back to the office when the shutdown ends.

spk_0 Chris Mim's adjunct professor of public administration at the Maxwell School at Syracuse

spk_0 University and former managing director for strategic issues at the government accountability

spk_0 office.

spk_0 Chris, welcome.

spk_0 It's great to see you again.

spk_0 Two stories before we start with the conversation.

spk_0 You told me two stories before we went on the air about shutdowns past.

spk_0 The first one has to do with your diplomatic stint and the second one is less formal than

spk_0 that.

spk_0 Let me hear those stories again.

spk_0 Let other people hear those stories again.

spk_0 Chris, welcome.

spk_0 Well, it's welcome.

spk_0 It's great to talk with you again, Francis.

spk_0 Well, the first is in my friends and colleagues would say, I am the farthest thing possible

spk_0 from a diplomat, but nevertheless during the 2013 shutdown, there was an international

spk_0 conference where I would be representing the US GAO and therefore the US government.

spk_0 There is a provision in appropriations that if you have a representational function,

spk_0 you are not part of the shutdown that is you are part of your exempted from it, your

spk_0 viewed as an invanaculars as an essential employee.

spk_0 What was interesting about that is that so for the first part of the shutdown, I was

spk_0 out with everyone else in the office.

spk_0 Then I'm brought back in, but it's also been very, was made very clear that I'm being

spk_0 brought in only for the amount of time that was relevant to working on that conference.

spk_0 Not for other activities that were under my portfolio.

spk_0 I wasn't interact with people on other issues.

spk_0 What this underscores is that for during a shutdown, you can have federal employees come

spk_0 in and out of working relationships.

spk_0 They can have their responsibilities guarded while they're back in.

spk_0 It's not a matter of just the great majority going out and then coming back in when it's

spk_0 all over.

spk_0 The other one that's pertinent to those of us that were federal employees, they're very

spk_0 shut down, you're allowed several hours to orderly shut down the office, it's putting

spk_0 away, away messages and all the rest.

spk_0 We found that not everyone was as diligent as they should be in cleaning out the refrigerator

spk_0 at work.

spk_0 After the 2018-19 shutdown, which was the longest in history, went 34 days, we came back

spk_0 in and we knew as soon as we stepped off the elevators, you could smell that the food

spk_0 in the refrigerator and some of them had not been cleaned out.

spk_0 That's just a small way of returning to work can be a challenge as well.

spk_0 The second story you tell is priceless because right now everybody needs a little bit of a

spk_0 laugh.

spk_0 I can imagine what that will smell like coming off the elevator and some of these buildings

spk_0 where people forgot to take lunch home.

spk_0 Some of the stuff already probably looked like biology experiments anyway.

spk_0 The first story I think is pertinent because there's a misperception especially in some

spk_0 of the media that I've seen that doesn't really focus on the federal government all the

spk_0 time.

spk_0 First of all, everybody's not working in the federal government and secondly that everybody

spk_0 stopped working the federal government on October 1st and won't go back until the Congress

spk_0 makes some kind of deal in the present signs, some type of appropriation vehicle.

spk_0 That has not been the experience that I've seen in any of the shutdowns that I've been

spk_0 close to government for Chris.

spk_0 Absolutely, Francis.

spk_0 In that, GAO did a couple of reports on previous shutdowns, one that looked at the one in

spk_0 October of 2013 that shut down the government for 16 days and then the second one that

spk_0 looked at the one month shutdown as I referenced earlier between December 2018 and 2019.

spk_0 One of the things we focused on, especially in the one in the 1819 shutdown was the importance

spk_0 of ongoing communication with employees because first you keep them involved or informed

spk_0 about what's going on but also to recognize as we've been discussing that some people

spk_0 are going to come in.

spk_0 Some people are going to come in for a little bit of period of time and some people are

spk_0 then going to leave again.

spk_0 Some of them are going to come in with somewhat different responsibilities or more constrained

spk_0 or restricted levels of responsibilities and they may have had in the past.

spk_0 Presumably, some will come in with broader responsibilities during a shutdown than they

spk_0 would have had in the past.

spk_0 It's not just a matter of telling everyone on one morning, okay, you're gone and the next

spk_0 time you'll hear from us is when you read it in the media that the government is reopened

spk_0 and then I'll come back.

spk_0 There's a lot of give and take that takes place during shutdowns, especially those that

spk_0 have a tendency to go on for a while because new issues emerge that need to be dealt with.

spk_0 You anticipated my next question, which is does the length of the shutdown have an impact

spk_0 on what it is that people find other than Tunis salad when they get back to the office?

spk_0 Very much.

spk_0 And the report that we did on looking at the October 2013 shutdown looked at the actual

spk_0 effects of shutdowns.

spk_0 And certainly there's some short term or rather immediate ones.

spk_0 And those are the ones that are all relative recognizable to us.

spk_0 Is that grants don't get issued, contracts don't get issued, and to the public, you know,

spk_0 federal offices, museums, parks begin to close down, things like that.

spk_0 There's also a set though of longer term issues in terms of mission and performance to

spk_0 agencies that get harder to kind of tease out whether how much it's actually caused just

spk_0 by the shutdown because there's often a lot of other things that are at play on this.

spk_0 But you have people that come back that, you know, and there are real mission consequences.

spk_0 You know, I mean, first they've, you know, especially today, federal employees are under

spk_0 enormous stress because of enormous, you know, because of great workload.

spk_0 There's all this workload that's been backing up, you know, as a result, that all needs

spk_0 to be dealt with while new demands will be continued to be placed on them.

spk_0 The bottom line on a lot of this is unfortunately we have a pretty good sense of good practices

spk_0 for managing a shutdown and reopening government.

spk_0 And the reason I say unfortunately is because there's been quite a bit of experience on this,

spk_0 both at an agency level, a corporate level as well as an individual level on how to manage

spk_0 these things.

spk_0 Yeah, as the only way to get leading practices on is to have to deal with it.

spk_0 And so that means you've had shutdowns.

spk_0 What are some of those leading practices and how does one go about determining how to

spk_0 implement those in the situation and the office in which one resides?

spk_0 I think they fall into two very broad buckets and they're interrelated, but just to separate

spk_0 them out for a moment.

spk_0 One is on the mission aspect of that.

spk_0 And I touched on that already is that, you know, there's already backlogs at many agencies

spk_0 are facing work demands because certainly, you know, changing circumstances that, you

spk_0 know, will lead to spikes in demands on agencies.

spk_0 When they come back, if federal employees will have to be dealing with that, they'll have

spk_0 to be dealing with what had been the existing as well as a new backlog that, you know,

spk_0 that emerged during the shutdown.

spk_0 What we found on that is that it's very important for agencies to have in place a set of clearly

spk_0 defined and documented and consistently communicated set of criteria for how that backlog will

spk_0 be addressed.

spk_0 It's not always going to make sense that, you know, kind of the oldest case, the oldest

spk_0 grant request or the oldest contract request is the first one that gets done.

spk_0 There are some will have greater needs, some will be a critical path for other activities

spk_0 that you want other want to undertake.

spk_0 The point to this is to make sure that you have understanding and documentation that

spk_0 you can then communicate to stakeholders about where they are in the sense in the queue

spk_0 in terms of getting things restarted.

spk_0 So one of those one set of practices is concerns those on the mission side on that.

spk_0 I think the second one, and this is just at least as important, is on the people aspect

spk_0 of that.

spk_0 I mean, we've already talked about there's a whole number of people that are going to

spk_0 be home.

spk_0 There are a lot of the shutdown.

spk_0 There are people that are going to be working during the shutdown.

spk_0 There are people that have suffered different financial consequences of those, certainly low

spk_0 or graded employees or newer employees.

spk_0 Don't have the financial resources necessarily to be, you know, floating from a, you know,

spk_0 or missing a paycheck on something like that.

spk_0 They may have had a vastly different experience in higher graded employees that, you know,

spk_0 who, you know, said, oh, it wasn't all that bad.

spk_0 I got to, you know, quite a bit of time off on this.

spk_0 How you deal with them and how you talk with them is managers.

spk_0 And this is on top of the stress that people are already feeling.

spk_0 Obviously, we're on a very uncertain federal environment to these days.

spk_0 How you talk with them and more importantly, how you listen to them.

spk_0 It's, you know, what we would always tell managers is that, you know, people are, you know,

spk_0 especially federal employees, is that, you know, they're smart and they're engaged on

spk_0 that.

spk_0 Just hear them out.

spk_0 Listen to their concerns.

spk_0 Tell them what you know and tell them what you don't know.

spk_0 And, you know, if you do that, you can maintain those lines of communication and openness on

spk_0 that.

spk_0 Just to, you know, one other kind of aspect on that is the federal employee viewpoint survey,

spk_0 which was taken every year.

spk_0 It's been, you know, kind of postponed for this year.

spk_0 When you look at the factors, the questions that were most directly related to engage employee

spk_0 engagement.

spk_0 There were six or seven or so of those overwhelmingly, what they dealt with is that effective

spk_0 communication between employees and first line supervisors and two way communication on

spk_0 that.

spk_0 And if we keep those bounds, those, those, those, those, that communication open and

spk_0 consistent, we're going to be in pretty good shape, even during very, very difficult

spk_0 and uncertain times.

spk_0 One of the things that struck me about the 2019 shutdown was everybody saw that comment.

spk_0 There was no, it didn't sneak up on anybody.

spk_0 And yet after it was over, I had any number of people, both managers who kind of gave

spk_0 themselves away, unfortunately.

spk_0 And rank and file employees say, I didn't have any way to keep in touch with my people during

spk_0 the shutdown.

spk_0 Like that seems to me that that's a no brainer.

spk_0 And here we are again.

spk_0 In 2025, we all saw this comment.

spk_0 There was plenty of warning and it's striking to me that there were still folks, hopefully

spk_0 not nearly as many this time around.

spk_0 But there are still folks, both then and now who probably didn't really do a great job

spk_0 of preparing themselves or preparing their teams that this was a possibility.

spk_0 And I should be able to figure out how I'm going to communicate with my people during

spk_0 in the interim.

spk_0 No, that's an excellent point.

spk_0 And I mean, we spoke earlier is that there's a body of experience from which we are able

spk_0 to draw good practices on this that does not necessarily mean that you have the same

spk_0 people at a leadership or management level for each of these various shutdowns.

spk_0 And so in some senses, these lessons have to be relearned.

spk_0 I mean, that's, you know, we're required to at least in the past two.

spk_0 In a sense, turn off people's access to the network.

spk_0 You know, we all had those, had those away messages.

spk_0 And unless there was ways through private email or private phone number, you know, mobile

spk_0 numbers or something like that for the government to communicate with you, you know, your colleagues

spk_0 and government to communicate with you on non-workrelated things.

spk_0 Only when you were to come back in, you know, being brought back in.

spk_0 You can say, gee, say, I really wish I could, you know, get Chris and Francis back in here.

spk_0 We need them.

spk_0 But the only way to get them is through email and that's turned off.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 What are the things that people can be doing now for whenever this ends to be as well prepared

spk_0 as possible to get back to work as quickly as possible?

spk_0 I think there are, in those two areas that I mentioned earlier on the mission side and

spk_0 on the people side is that first there, there in the, when there's a lapse of appropriation,

spk_0 you are not to work.

spk_0 And so it's very important that they not be doing, you know, work, you know, uncompensated

spk_0 work.

spk_0 And so that's, that's the important aspect of that.

spk_0 What you can be thinking about and what I encourage people to think about is how they

spk_0 will talk to their people once they're back.

spk_0 What sort of messages are they going to give?

spk_0 How are they going to hear them out?

spk_0 And in understand the different individuals that will have different stress levels as a result

spk_0 of this, different reactions to this, people that have been working versus those that

spk_0 have not necessarily been working.

spk_0 And we, you know, the financial aspects that we discussed earlier on that, everyone is

spk_0 going to have their own individual stories on how they reacted to this.

spk_0 They're going to need to be heard out on that.

spk_0 And so understanding and appreciating that.

spk_0 And then on the mission side, beginning to think through how they will sort through the

spk_0 workload, how they're going to be managing that on, and from an organizational

spk_0 standpoint, I think both of those are very important.

spk_0 But again, I want to underscore when there's a lapse of appropriations.

spk_0 They're not, they're not to be working.

spk_0 This is, and to that point, this is obviously a scenario that would never happen in real

spk_0 life.

spk_0 But I'm your boss, and I have your contact information.

spk_0 And I've got, and maybe there's 10 people on, on our team.

spk_0 What's appropriate and what's legal for me to contact you about during this time?

spk_0 What constitutes work?

spk_0 Like is it work if I just refer to work in some kind of contact with you, or is that completely

spk_0 verboten until the time, until such time as I can say Chris, everything's closed and

spk_0 Monday, we would like you to be back in the office at nine o'clock.

spk_0 Yeah, and I need to stress, I'm not an appropriations lawyer, and it wasn't one in your

spk_0 GAO, and so that, you know, with that is the caveat.

spk_0 The second thing is, is being from GAO, we were probably very cautious and very conservative

spk_0 in this regard, you know, the closest that we would even come to, that I would come to

spk_0 talking with someone is just checking in with them.

spk_0 It's just saying, hey, how you doing?

spk_0 Are things going okay?

spk_0 What are you hearing?

spk_0 What do you think, and all that?

spk_0 But making it very clear that any information that I would share would not be official information

spk_0 wouldn't want to talk about, hey, you know, since I have you on the phone, let's talk

spk_0 about where you are on that particular project, right?

spk_0 There would be none of that that would take place.

spk_0 Chris, it's great to have you on the program.

spk_0 I love getting your insight on this stuff.

spk_0 Thank you for joining me today.

spk_0 Francis, it's my great pleasure and good luck to you.

spk_0 You can read more about the shutdown on today's show page at fedgovtoday.com.

spk_0 With the shutdown in progress, now more former government leaders will join me on the next

spk_0 fedgovtoday TV.

spk_0 They'll tell you about what to expect in the coming weeks as you manage and lead through

spk_0 the shutdown and eventually prepare to restart.

spk_0 You can watch the debut of this week's show on ABC7 in Washington and on the Fedgovtoday

spk_0 YouTube channel at 1030 Sunday morning.

spk_0 If you missed the debut, you can watch any time at fedgovtoday.com and on YouTube.

spk_0 The Fedgovtoday podcast is back tomorrow to help you navigate the shutdown with special

spk_0 shows every day until the shutdown ends.

spk_0 To make sure you don't miss them, follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube,

spk_0 or wherever you get your shows.

spk_0 You can listen on demand if fedgovtoday.com.

spk_0 I'm Francis Rose.

spk_0 Thanks for listening.

The Smell of Shutdown: What Really Happens When Government Stops

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