The United States Government Is Shut Down. Does Anyone Care?

Those living outside the USA may not know that our government has been shut down for about a month now. Those inside the USA may or may not have seen the effects and, for some of us, may be completely oblivious. For those who work for the US government, I am sure all of you know about the shut down very well as you have gotten an unscheduled vacation without pay or have been asked to work without pay. You, of course, care very much about the shutdown. Those not being directly affected probably do not care very much, if at all.

The basic reason our government is shut down is U.S. President Trump is using this as leverage to get a wall built on the border of the USA and Mexico. The intention of Trump's wall is to stop or slow down illegal immigration to the USA across our southern border. 

At AFT the government shut down has affected us, but only slightly. Frankly, I am not aware of everything that is or is not shut down. One way we have been slightly impacted is that we license a thermophysical property database from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The database is called REFPROP and we added to all our software in 2018. We have needed some technical support on REFPROP but NIST is closed and emails bounce back informing us of the shut shutdown.

This week I happen to be flying for business purposes within the USA and the airport security, called TSA for those who live outside the U.S., is semi-shutdown. The TSA workers are there (for now) but are not getting paid. The ones I met at security this week were much more cheerful than I would have expected, given the circumstances. At some point, if the impasse is not resolved, the TSA workers are going to have to quit and find other jobs or some other source of income. I hope I can get back home later this week! 

AFT has customers at many U.S. National Labs. My guess is they are shut down too, but I do not know. Coming up in February we are scheduled to teach training classes for two customers whose business is the defense industry. They seem to be working. I do not know if they are getting paid for their work by the U.S. government.

There seems to a large amount of politcal situations around the world at the moment, and we are keeping an eye on several including Brexit. 

Regardless, AFT will continue on our own road to ensure engineers, no matter what their countries political situations, are able to design and troubleshoot engineering projects.