The government shutdown ended at 12:50 a.m. on October 17 sending federal employees back to work. As a result, National Parks can fully reopen, but according to the Western Governors’ Association, states that paid to reopen the parks won’t be repaid under the current legislation.
A state will only be refunded money if it paid for “more days than necessary — for example, it donated money to operate a site for 10 days and the government reopened after seven.” However, Congress needs to specifically authorize the repayment of any money spent that states had donated to fund the sites.
The Association notes that there a pair of bills being proposed by Senator Lamar Alexander and Representative Steve Daines that would reimburse states within 90 days for costs associated with operating the national parks.
The cap on the Federal Highway Administration’s emergency spending ability to rebuild infrastructure has been lifted from $100 million to $450 million, the amount that Colorado lawmakers requested to cover damage caused by recent floods in the state.
On October 16, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa issued a subpoena to National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis for documents related to the Park Service’s budget strategy during sequestration.
The subpoena was issued during a joint hearing on the Park Service’s decision to barricade open-air memorials, including the World War II Memorial, to visitors and veterans during the government shutdown. During both sequestration and the current government shutdown, reports have alleged the Park Service directed employees to make the budget setbacks as visible and painful as possible.
“After months of waiting, it is clear that Director Jarvis’s promise to deliver hundreds of pages of documents to this Committee is meaningless,” Chairman Issa said in a statement. “It is unfortunate that Director Jarvis has left us with no other option but to issue a subpoena.”
The subpoena requests all documents to be provided by October 30, 2013. The documents in question were originally requested on March 27, 2013, before a committee hearing in April on the Park Service’s strategy to implement budget cuts mandated by sequestration. On October 15, 2013, Chairman Issa and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a letter to Director Jarvis which called the department’s actions seemingly “ad-hoc, inconsistent, and without sensible guidance to states, local communities, and the public at large.”