In the historic two-year Illinois budget impasse from 2016-18, state contractors went without getting paid for months and sometimes years. This impacted members of the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors' National Association (SMACNA) and even gave membership in the bordering states a taste of what was to come as divided government funding resolutions trended national. 

Federally, shutdowns were common in Congress amid the ‘70s and ‘80s. They grew less common after 1981, when the U.S. Attorney General at the time determined agencies couldn’t operate without appropriations – making the consequences of failing to come to agreement on funding legislation much more severe for downstream contractors.  

More government shutdowns took effect in 1990 and 1995 after the Gingrich Revolution. Shutdown government returned again in 2013 with the Tea Party movement, and while the threat of shutdowns has grown intermittently louder since then, the federal government has hence only shutdown once in 2018 when former President Donald Trump clashed with Congress over funding the southern border wall.  

On the edge of another cliff this week before the holiday season, the new GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson yielded to his more moderate Republican members, said Stanley E. Kolbe Jr., executive director of government and political affairs for SMACNA – agreeing on a clean continuing resolution and zeroing out the possibility of a shutdown this year with a vote of 336 to 95, with 209 of the votes coming from Democrats. 

“The new speaker, after pulling numerous major appropriations bills for lack of support, took the CR to the entire House membership. This also indicated he is quickly finding out that with only so much time in session to pass critical bills, tolerating shutdown threats and debating frivolous amendments were not how he wanted to run the railroad,” Kolbe said optimistically. “So that's a good sign to see him pushing back on those who thought he would cheer on a type of strategic chaos to befriend the small but significant GOP “trouble caucus,” but he's not, so that's positive, for now.”

He still cautions that experienced and skeptical contractors should still become “familiar with this stop again, start again, maybe get paid, new normal. Who can really know with any certainty what’s going to happen next?” 

The association of union sheet metal shops Kolbe represents, working closely with International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART), is taking a proactive strategy to deal with the prospect of future government shutdowns by making sure public sector contractors are fully informed and prepared. 

“We have sent out a notice to our members because we do a significant number of federal projects. We did the Pentagon for example,” Kolbe said. “We’re paying our workforce every week and if federal contracts shutdown, we could end up disrupting balance sheets and other jobs while we're waiting to finish these important government projects.”  

He said that while the federal government has adopted a forward funding model for some specified infrastructure projects, this isn’t a sure-fire failsafe on every federal or federally assisted project. Plus, work by federal construction project teams often must still stop amid most government shutdowns – causing delays, idle hands and cash flow concerns. 

“Not only can key agency staff often not work when they're shut down, contracting officials running federal projects and oversight staff can't take their computer and work remotely to keep jobs moving. Our goal is to try and do the right thing for our members, in advance,” Kolbe said. “We feel we need to do all we can to prevent disruptions on every federal project we are helping build. Without constant vigilance and having the right federal contracting information, members could be a victim of Capitol Hill dysfunction.” 

You still can’t be 100 percent confident amid the current era of political brinkmanship, Kolbe concluded, classifying Congress as “too often operating with a chaos management style that can harm even sophisticated contractors, and of course, wider market sectors.”