Snow gathers on a fence surrounding the White House during a winter storm on the 23rd day of the US government shutdown. | Brendan SmialowskiI/AFP/Getty Images government shutdown Shutdown's hidden impact: Frozen inspections, fraud cases Agencies have furloughed employees in charge of enforcing rules and conducting investigations, include those affecting the environment, financial abuse and taxes.

The 24-day-old shutdown is hobbling enforcement efforts throughout the federal government — halting power plant and oil well inspections, slowing financial fraud probes and tax audits, thwarting plane crash investigations and even delaying a probe into Facebook's privacy practices.

Agencies have also canceled training for prosecutors who go after online child pornography and drug sales. The Justice Department has furloughed most of its administrative judges, who enforce immigration laws. And the Federal Communications Commission isn't responding to consumer complaints about robocalls.


The resulting pileup could take months to untangle even after the shutdown ends, federal enforcement officials told POLITICO — even as some agencies began calling in employees such as aircraft inspectors to work without pay.

These are some of the ways the shutdown is posing an increasing risk to public health and welfare:

Environmental inspections missed

Former federal enforcement officials say the main problem is simple: Employees who should be looking for pollution, safety hazards and other threats are sitting at home instead of on the case.

"If you’re not getting out there, you’re not collecting evidence, [and] the evidence is not necessarily going to hang around," said Eric Schaeffer, who spent more a decade working in enforcement the Environmental Protection Agency and now runs the Environmental Integrity Project. "Not being on the job, you're not at the plants, you’re not catching violations in progress."

As one example, Schaeffer pointed to a November EPA inspection at an oil production site in western Oklahoma, where a rusty pipe is leaking brine into a stream that flows into a drinking water reservoir for four cities. The inspector measured high levels of chemicals downstream of the site, along with 500 dead fish along the stream's banks.

The report calls for further inspections, though it’s unclear whether that can happen with EPA closed.

Meanwhile, the shutdown has caused EPA to miss inspections at some of the thousands of factories, recycling plants, power plants and other facilities it oversees. The agency schedules its full year of inspections each fall, and missed site visits might not be made up until the next year.

EPA's website says it conducted an average of 226 civil inspections a week in 2017, figures that suggest the agency could have missed 678 inspections so far because of the shutdown. (Agency spokesperson John Konkus cautioned that inspections aren’t evenly spaced out throughout the year and "typically occur during the warm weather months, not in winter.")

Once the inspections find problems, agency employees would normally spend weeks or months negotiating solutions and penalties with the companies. But those employees have been furloughed too, and negotiations could be set back months.

"Everything gets stacked up," said Adam Kushner, who ran civil enforcement for EPA under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama before leaving for the private sector. "You’re not just rescheduling one meeting, you’re rescheduling multiple meetings. That delay could be a month or two or longer."

Enforcement offices also aren’t around to answer businesses’ questions about how environmental and safety rules apply to them — an often-unappreciated tool for heading off problems.

"EPA doing inspections and investigating violations helps stop pollution problems that are concerning for the communities where they are located," said Cynthia Giles, who headed EPA's enforcement office under Obama. "But it also does something else that's just as important: motivates companies to do the right thing so they don't violate in the first place, and protects the companies that play by the rules so they don't have to compete with the companies that cut corners."

Konkus said EPA is continuing to field complaints about leaks, spills and other violations, and would use non-furloughed staff to protect life and property.

"All the regions are monitoring their tips and complaints hotlines to learn if there are any emergency releases that would require an unplanned inspection," he said.

EPA has pursued at least one big enforcement case in the midst of the shutdown, announcing Thursday that it had reached a $900 million settlement with Fiat Chrysler over the company's cheating on air pollution tests on more than 100,000 diesel vehicles. But the agency said it brought in staff specifically to work on that case that because the court had set a deadline.

Meanwhile, the Interior Department has sent home about half the staff of its Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, whose regulations aim to prevent a repeat of offshore drilling disasters like 2010’s multi-month Gulf of Mexico oil gusher. The remaining staff are supposed to ensure the safe operation of oil wells and continue issuing permits, Interior’s shutdown plan says, but watchdogs are skeptical that the agency can maintain reasonable oversight over a booming oil industry.

"I haven't seen any indication the level of activity on the part of the oil companies is lessening," said Michael Bromwich, who ran BSEE under Obama. “If the activity isn’t slacking off but the number of inspections is, that at least to some extent increases the risk of accidents.”

‘Pressure is off’ at the SEC



Enforcement has also slowed to a trickle at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“The pressure is off a little bit,” remarked one lawyer representing clients facing SEC enforcement, who said agency attorneys are not calling to follow up on their subpoenas demanding documents.

Additionally, employees at the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, which refers cases to the enforcement division for consideration, can’t travel to investment adviser firms for onsite visits.

The only cases the SEC is advancing are those that face either a judge’s deadline or a danger of hitting the statute of limitations, sources familiar with the matter said. The agency also has staff members fielding tips about possible misconduct, one of the sources said.

“Active investigations that are routine have ground to a halt,” said Jacob Frenkel, a lawyer with Dickinson Wright and a former senior counsel in the SEC’s enforcement division. Still, he said, “investigations that require expedited action in court to stop a fraud likely are continuing to move.”

Tax audits on hold

At the Internal Revenue Service, audits and other efforts to ensure that taxpayers are paying the correct amount have ground to a halt. And that gives an advantage to people purposefully trying to avoid taxes, former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said.

"The days lost can’t be made up after the shutdown ends," Koskinen said, noting that the IRS has fewer employees because of budget cuts. “People keep forgetting that that’s the result at many agencies.”

Still, criminal investigations are continuing under the agency’s shutdown plan. More than a quarter of the almost 10,000 IRS employees still on the job during the shutdown work in law enforcement.

Reprieve for Facebook

The Federal Trade Commission has halted its investigation into Facebook’s alleged mishandling of users’ data, a case that lawmakers have already complained is dragging on too long.

The probe — just one example of the growing scrutiny on Silicon Valley’s data practices — was sparked by last year’s revelation that the data firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, had improperly gained access to information on about 87 million Facebook users. It has since grown to encompass the social media giant’s broader handling of users’ data, centering on whether Facebook violated a 2011 agreement with the FTC.

But now the case is on hold, to be picked up when the 1,100-plus-employee agency is again fully operational. Under the FTC’s contingency plans, only investigations involving corporate mergers are moving ahead.

The timing is likely to increase the tension over tech in Washington. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told reporters just before the holidays that it was “unacceptable” that the agency’s examination of Facebook had been proceeding at what he called “a snail’s pace.”

That’s not the only kind of consumer technology complaint going unaddressed. At the FCC, a link for filing reports about an unwanted or illegal phone call redirects to a notice about the funding lapse.

Crash probes halted

Furloughs have forced the National Transportation Safety Board to halt ongoing investigations into plane crashes, train derailments and other accidents — probes that not only pinpoint the accidents’ causes but produce recommendations on how regulators can improve public safety.

The agency said it has had to forgo new investigations into at least a dozen incidents, including a tractor-trailer crash with a school bus that injured 15 people and a small plane crash that killed four.

It has also halted work on a final report about a fatal December 2017 derailment in which an Amtrak passenger train hurtled off a bridge onto Interstate 5 in Washington state, crushing cars on the highway. Amtrak service along the route remains suspended until the final report comes out.

Training postponed for prosecutors, baggage screeners

The shutdown forced the Justice Department to cancel a training session last week for its prosecutors about online markets on the so-called dark web where criminals trade in narcotics, child pornography and other illicit goods, a DOJ employee told POLITICO.

Staff from the department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section were scheduled to host the Dark Market and Online Investigations Seminar for assistant U.S. attorneys from Jan. 8 to Jan. 10. But because CCIPS employees were furloughed except for case-related work, the event did not take place, said the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an internal matter.

The seminar, which was to be held at DOJ’s National Advocacy Center in Columbia, S.C., would have included briefings by FBI agents and federal prosecutors involved in the takedowns of major markets.

A DOJ spokesperson confirmed the cancellation.

Without this training, the employee said, prosecutors “may not have the knowledge they need to effectively investigate crime ranging from computer intrusions to child pornography to the sale of narcotics and more.”

Similarly, the Transportation Security Administration canceled training last week for 323 employees who do front-line security work like airport screening. While basic training classes that are considered “mission critical” continue at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia, 18 supervisory and advanced training classes for TSA workers have been nixed, an agency spokesperson said.

Furloughs hit immigration courts

Federal immigration courts, which fall under the Justice Department, have drastically reduced their workload as the majority of roughly 400 judges have been furloughed, said Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. That will add to the court’s growing case backlog, which stands at more than 809,000 cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

As many as 100,000 people waiting for a court hearing could be affected if the shutdown continues through the end of the month, the clearinghouse said.

Judges who hear cases of detained migrants have continued to work without pay. But judges who handle the “non-detained docket” have been furloughed, Tabaddor said.

Judges who preside over non-detained dockets, including certain requests for asylum, can involve waits of several years, which mean a canceled court date can’t easily be placed back on the calendar.

Among other things, that can make it harder for immigrants in deportation proceedings who are seeking to stay in the U.S., for instance if they are citing hardship involving children or ill relatives. If those cases are pushed back for years, the children can become adults, or sick family members can pass away, undercutting the argument for relief.

In asylum cases, evidence can become stale and witnesses can be harder to track down, with serious consequences for applicants who eventually aim to bring vulnerable family members into the U.S.

“It can mean that someone can be seriously hurt or killed waiting for their family’s case to be heard,” Tabaddor said.

Margaret Harding McGill, Nancy Scola, Ted Hesson, Patrick Temple-West, Tanya Snyder, Eric Geller, Jennifer Scholtes, Bernie Becker and Brianna Ehley contributed to this report.