How Government Shutdowns Impact the Public Sector Labor Market

• In Event: How the Federal Government Shapes Administrative Practices

Abstract

United States federal government shutdowns have long been viewed as signs of government dysfunction. As shutdowns increase in frequency and length for the US federal government, it is not difficult to postulate that such dysfunction might have an impact on the federal government in terms of its agencies’ relative ability to recruit the talent necessary to prevent loss of capacity and further dysfunction. However, we know little about the effects of these phenomena on the US federal civil service labor market.
In this paper, we examine the effects on the inflow dynamics of the federal labor market using (among other data) several hundred thousand job posting and applicant observations from USAJobs.gov and USAStaffing.gov across open lines in the federal government from 2018 to 2023. We focus on the 2018-2019 shutdown and its intervening impact of the 2018-2019 shutdown on the federal labor market.
Through the collection of agency contingency plans and FOIA responses, we account for whether an agency was shutdown (as many agencies were not directly affected) and the varying extent to which an agency’s workforce was furloughed. We exploit this variation to test the impact of the shutdown on agencies through both the binary intervention of whether an agency was shut down and the continuous “intensity” of that shutdown through the percentage of agencies’ workforces that were furloughed.
We expect that the 2019 shutdown led to an increase in how long it took to place hires across agencies overall as well as the number of jobs that were posted in the immediate aftermath of the shutdown. We expect that the scope of this impact will be driven by whether an agency was directly affected by the shutdown and that the intensity of that impact will be associated with the number of employees furloughed. When modeling the nature of overall hiring trends within agencies, we expect that professional job openings are lengthened in response to a shutdown relative to non-professional jobs. When breaking jobs out by specific types, we expect that occupations that have higher levels of private sector demand will have lengthened job postings in agencies that were shutdown.
We implement various empirical strategies based on the unit of analysis, e.g., individual, agency, job posting, and the structure of the data, e.g., time-series and cross-sectional. In sum, government shutdowns might have immense influence on the US civil service labor market. In this study, we analyze how this may affect potential applicants of public service. We expect that our work will contribute to executive politics and public administration scholarship along with providing important insights for practitioners.

Authors

• William G. Resh, University of Southern California

• Yongjin Ahn, Korea University - Sejong Campus

• Keunyoung Lee, University of Southern California- Price School of Public Policy