Turning off lights and locking doors could cost billions

By DANNY VINIK 01/21/2018 01:45 PM EST

... . Budget experts and past analyses by the White House budget office have found that a shutdown hurts the U.S.' finances in a number of ways. Furloughed workers almost always get paid retroactively for the time they were out — which means taxpayers are laying out money without getting any work in return. Museums and national parks can’t collect fees and revenues from other sources like gift shops. Perhaps most importantly, federal workers spend thousands of cumulative work hours preparing for the event and recovering from it, literally shutting down their systems and then restarting them once the government reopens — paid work that is utterly unnecessary to the normal business of running the country, and sucks time away from safety inspections, or reviewing research grants, or whatever their actual responsibilities are.

Quantifying the exact cost to the government is difficult, in part because every shutdown is different. Between November 1995 and January 1996, the government shut down twice for a total of 27 days as Democrats and Republicans clashed over Medicare funding, among other issues. A subsequent analysis conducted by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget estimated that both shutdowns together cost the government $1.4 billion—more than $2 billion today after adjusting for inflation. "That's not monopoly money," then-President Bill Clinton said in January 1996 as the two parties were on the verge of yet another shutdown. "Shutting down the government again would be unbelievably irresponsible."

Of that $1.4 billion, roughly $1.1 billion was salary paid to federal workers who stayed home and didn't work. The remaining $300 million came from other sources, such as the lost revenue from the closure of national parks and public museums. According to the budget office, the shutdown resulted in the cancellation of seven million visits to the national parks and two million visits to museums and other cultural sites, such as the Smithsonian and Kennedy Center ...

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2018/01/21/why-the-government-shutdown-actually-costs-money-000624