Government Shutdown Effects Montana

By: Alyssa Tompkins

The US rang in the final days of 2018 with one astounding problem: the 3rd government shutdown of the year. This shutdown lasted until the end of January, 2019 and created many problems for a multitude of Americans. Now, many of you may be thinking, how does this affect me? The answer is somewhat complex because it may have not affected you in a major way. Even though you may not of been impacted by the shutdown, there were plenty of other people in Montana, and even Helena, whose lives were altered by the government shutdown.

According to Time Magazine, some odd 380,000 federal workers were furloughed and another 420,000 were required to work without pay. That’s a huge chunk of the American workforce that is temporarily out of work and without pay. Two paychecks. Think about that, two entire paychecks that could not be put towards feeding families, college savings accounts, rent, mortgage, or anything else. Families were forced to live off of one paycheck and attempt to make life normal in this time.

I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty policy aspects of the shutdown, just know I don’t have an answer as to how the gridlock should have been solved. All I know is that it created a massive problem for Montanans who work at the federal level, and that’s enough to frustrate me and anyone else close to the situation occurring in Washington, D.C.

Helena is a government town; this makes Helena a very volatile town when it comes to shutdowns of any nature. I spoke with CHS senior, Kaley Lightner, who said her mother couldn’t work her second job because it is a federal job. This took money out of the hands of her family who, no matter if they desperately needed the paycheck, could have used it. While this was only one experience I was able to personally hear, I know that there were more people who were out of work in Montana due to the government shutdown of 2018.