As shutdown ripples through Georgia, voters consider who to blame
Stephen and Amantha Moore were just beginning a national parks road trip when the government shut down. Sam Gringlas/NPR hide caption
Sam Gringlas/NPR
ATLANTA — The federal government is closed for a third day. With national park visitor centers locked and hundreds of thousands of federal employees furloughed, Republicans and Democrats say voters should hold the other side responsible for the fallout.
But in Georgia, some are focused less on who's to blame than how long the shutdown will last.
The last shutdown dragged on for 35 days from Dec. 2018 to Jan. 2019. Among the hardest hit were Transportation Security Administration employees at Atlanta's humungous airport who had to keep working without pay.
'We did mass distributions of food and there were hundreds of cars in line of people who needed help,' said Atlanta Community Food Bank president Kyle Waide.
He said it is not clear yet if his organization will be seeing a small uptick in need or something more catastrophic if the shutdown continues for weeks.
Waide said the food bank will do what it can to help families. But if funding runs dry for federal food aid programs such as Women Infants and Children, or WIC, the nonprofit cannot meet the full need for some necessities like baby formula.
'Nonetheless, there will be more demand the food banks will have to respond to on top of that extraordinary level of need that they're already facing,' he said.
At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which employs thousands of people at its Atlanta campus, the shutdown also comes at an already taxing time.
The Trump Administration has already slashed CDC jobs and programs. This summer, a shooter who law enforcement says harbored conspiracies about vaccines, fired hundreds of rounds at CDC buildings.
Now thousands more employees are furloughed and President Trump has threatened mass layoffs during the shutdown.
'It feels like there's malice, versus what it was like back in 2018, 2019,' said Yolanda Jacobs, president of the union chapter that represents several thousand CDC employees.
'Now we feel like whatever is happening is meant to intentionally clear out and cull the herd, so to speak.'
