Government Shut Down

During my train trip, I talked with people about the effects of the 36-day government shutdown that began on December 21. The national parks, for example, remained open but without their usual staffing. This resulted in a scandalous array of brimming trashcans, overflowing toilets, and trespassing on the nation's public lands. As a rule, the parks are highly regulated in order to protect their beauty and the patrons who visit them. However, some 16,000 parks service employees were furloughed and only a small number of them were available for policing and security, according to the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). The above notice appeared at the entrance gate of the Colorado National Monument where Bobbie, Martin, and I visited in Grand Junction.




The Trump administration did not close the national parks because it wanted to avoid the same kind of criticism doled out to the Obama administration during the 2013  government shutdown, namely, that businesses near the parks would suffer. As a result, former Department of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke issued a policy document in January 2018 that the parks should continue to operate during any “lapse in appropriations,” such as a funding hold seen during shutdowns. Unfortunately, the influx of tourists was too much for the park staff that did show up, and much damage was done, some of it deliberate. 

The worst instance of this damage was Joshua Tree National Park in southern California, where "irreparable" damage was done including vandalism, ruined trails and trees cut down, said former superintendent Curt Sauer. He retired in 2010 after running the park for seven years.

“What’s happened to our park in the last 34 days is irreparable for the next 200 to 300 years,” he said, according to a report from the Desert Sun.

The Colorado National Monument in Grand Junction did not suffer the same fate. Like many volunteers at other parks, the people of the Grand Junction cleaned up the trash. Public toilets had also been locked.

In another instance, Bobbie and I were seated  with a mother and her three-year-old daughter. The mother was a federal employee for Health and Human Services and working without being payed. Her job entailed buying health insurance for Native American tribes. She said she was handling some difficult cases where people had life threatening diseases. If they didn’t get the health care the agency provided for them, they would die. In fact, her bosses had managed to juggle their funding so that the people continued to receive care. However, she said this care would only last two more weeks before the emergency funding would run out.

“I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of those above me,” she said. “They have been scrambling to keep the programs going.”

The woman also said that she and her fellow employees in critical care situations would be given a partial payment of their salaries on Friday. (As it turns out, the shutdown ended on Friday night.)

The woman had apparently saved some money to take care of her family’s needs even though her husband, also a federal employee for the Defense Department, was not getting paid either. Her daughter’s day care costs $200 per week. The woman seemed pretty calm about her situation and admitted to being a resourceful person who was strong enough to get through anything. Even so, the shutdown posed a particular challenge for her. 

She had taken the train because she couldn’t afford to fly. She was going to her brother's funeral to Green River, CO, where she would leave her daughter with her mother.

The woman revealed that she was a Native American with a doctorate in psychology and married to a white man. She said she knew Nathan Phillips, the Native American Marine Corps veteran who had made the news earlier that week when he and his fellow demonstrators were harassed by white teenagers from a boys' Catholic school in Covington, Kentucky. She was incensed with the treatment he received.

On my flight back to France, I asked a TSA inspector is she thought there were be another shut down on February 15 (which meant that she would have to work without pay again).

"I don't think so," she said. "The last one didn't work out very well. I don't think they'll try that again."

Amtrak employees were not affected by the shut down because Amtrak is a privately-run company that receives government subsidies.