Washington, DC—Tonight, Congressional Republicans shut down the federal government, leaving thousands of workers across the Commonwealth in limbo and causing thousands more to worry about their continued ability to access health care. It is appalling but not surprising that Republicans have chosen the needs of millionaires and billionaires over the hardworking families they supposedly represent. 

“Because of their basic inability to govern and their desire to force their wildly unpopular agenda through Congress, Republicans have shut down the government and are threatening to fire thousands of people,” said Ashleigh Crocker, Interim Executive Director at Progress Virginia. “That’s thousands of families who won’t be able to afford the cost of living because Republicans are playing politics with their lives. Whatever the rationale, shutdowns always harm everyday people far more than they harm the people causing the shutdowns. Republicans are willing to play politics with people’s lives because too many of them have forgotten what it means to work hard at a job so you can support your family. They are choosing billionaires over working families, who should not have to pay the price for Republicans’ political games.”

Here are some ways that people in our community will feel the effects of the government shutdown and the battle over proposed insurance rate increases in the short and medium term: 

• Furloughs and layoffs: Virginia has one of the highest concentrations of federal workers of any state in the US: 147,358 federal employees, in every part of the Commonwealth, are in danger of furlough, and Project 2025 architect and head of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought has told agencies to draft plans for mass firings in case of an extended shutdown. 

• Disruption to rural district budgets: In Virginia, small towns and rural areas use significantly more federal dollars than more prosperous urban and suburban areas; in fact, of the ten localities that rely the most heavily on federal dollars, seven are in CD-9 in southside Virginia, a district represented by Republican Morgan Griffith. Griffith’s district is also a heavy user of Department of Education funds: five of the top ten districts that rely the most on DoE funding are in CD-9. 

• Threats to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act Plans: Virginians rely heavily on Medicaid: about 35% of the population uses it as their sole or primary health insurance. More than 1 in 3 births are covered by the program, and close to half of Virginia children are Medicaid-eligible. Those numbers rise dramatically in the rural areas of the Commonwealth, and some of the highest percentages of Medicaid recipients live in Southside Virginia, an area that has already been hit hard by rising costs and other federal cuts. In addition, nearly 350,000 Virginians rely on plans that they obtain through the ACA. All of these users would see spikes in premiums, and many would see their plans eliminated altogether.

• Rural Hospital Closures:  A new study suggests that if the cuts to Medicaid in the budget reconciliation bill recently passed by the House go through, eight rural hospitals (about 26% of rural hospitals) are at immediate risk of closure. This would leave residents of large portions of the state without any access to hospital services, and If the cuts to Medicaid move through Congress, virtually every hospital west of Roanoke would close.