White House tells federal agencies to prepare government’s shutdown

Office of Management and Budget of the White House has instructed the federal agencies to prepare for the suspension of the government. This measure is related to the fact that the White House and the Republican opposition in the Congress failed to reach a compromise on government’s funding in the absence of a budget for the new 2014 fiscal year. It starts in the US October 1. As stated in the memorandum sent out to federal agencies by OMB head Sylvia Burwell, there are no signs that the Congress would timely approve a resolution on short-term financing of government, and that President Obama will sign it before the end of the day on October 1. "Thus, (federal) agencies must execute plans for an orderly shutdown of their work in terms of lack of funds", the document says. Burwell urged the Congress to quickly pass a resolution for short-time funding of the government to create the conditions that would allow adopting the budget for the remainder of the fiscal year and recover business-critical government agencies and programs. Today many U.S. governmental institutions are forced to stop their work. 800 thousand from 2.1 million federal employees will be placed on an unpaid leave, new applications for social security payments will be temporarily not accepted, state support for mortgages and loans to small businesses will be stopped, national parks and museums will close. In accordance with the U.S. legislation, ministries and agencies responsible for national security and foreign policy continue to work. In the history of the United States since 1977 until now the federal government funding was interrupted due to disagreements between the administration and the Congress for at least 17 times. The executive branch of the government had been left without money for various time intervals. The shortest of them was 3 days. The record was a long 21 days – from 15 December 1995 to 6 January 1996.