By Friday evening the House and Senate will have approved another continuing resolution (CR) that, yet again, kicks the Fiscal Year 2017 appropriations process down the road until April 28. With your help Goodwill ® urged Congress to wrap up all of the FY 2017 spending bills before the end of the year.
Why was this important? Because federal departments and agencies from Homeland Security, to Labor, to Health and Human Services have a very difficult time running their operations in the face of fiscal uncertainty. Imagine for a moment that your company wouldn’t tell you when you would be paid or how much. And that maybe your check would be reduced but that the reduction could be restored later. Could you pay your bills like that, or be ready in case of an emergency home or car repair, or a medical event, or even just plan a trip for the summer? Sure, you could do it, but it would be difficult.
Now imagine you are trying to manage programs with budgets in the tens of millions, or in the billions in the case of some departments. As we’ve said, it’s no way to run a railroad.
From Goodwill’s perspective, we are hoping that all this uncertainty about federal funding will not hurt our efforts around providing job training for people looking for work, vocational rehabilitation for people with disabilities, and the host of other grants and funding that Goodwill leverages to help all people with barriers to employment find good jobs.
There is little doubt that the new CR will pass before the current one expires on December 9. We thank you for urging Congress to finish their work on the funding bills before the end of the year. More than150 members of Congress got the message. We will keep you posted as Congress continues work on both the FY 2017, and with the start of the new year, the FY 2018 funding bills.
