Longest US Government Shutdown Hits Energy Star, Spares DOE

(Photo: A rally in Washington, DC, urging an end to the government shutdown. Credit: American Federation of Government Employees, Flickr Creative Commons)

The longest government shutdown in United States history continued on Monday morning, affecting around 800,000 federal workers as well as major agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency and its Energy Star program. However, the Department of Energy remains open, having previously received funding through September.

Talks are currently frozen and so is Washington, DC, itself due to a deadly winter storm that hit the region, CNN reported. No meetings have been scheduled on Capitol Hill for today, the outlet added.

The Environmental Protection Agency is among the major federal agencies affected, as are the Department of Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, the Interior, Justice, State, Transportation, and the Treasury, the New York Times reported.

On December 31, the EPA issued a shutdown contingency plan for handling operations. Critical Superfund work and some EPA laboratory support are exempted, but the EPA’s voluntary Energy Star program went offline. A cached notice for the site says, “The US federal government is closed due to a lapse in appropriations. For the duration of the US government shutdown, all Energy Star tools, resources, and data services will not be available.”

Lawmakers approved funding for the Department of Energy through September 30, which is the end of the 2019 budget cycle Nature’s Lauren Morello reported in late December.

The DOE, led by Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, announced $88 million in new federal funding on January 10 for oil and natural gas recovery research. “Despite the large volumes of oil and gas currently being produced from US conventional and unconventional resources, a majority of US oil remains in the ground; in some cases approximately 90% of in situ oil is not recovered with current technologies,” the department said.

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