That’s not unusual. In the nearly five decades since the current budgeting system has been in place, Congress has passed its required appropriations measures on time just four times, according to the Pew Research Center: in fiscal years 1977, 1989, 1995 and 1997.
Unfortunately, facing the prospect of at least a possible shutdown is becoming almost routine by now, one local defense contractor told the Dayton Daily News.
“I don’t have the exact number, but we are approaching 30 years, I think, since a budget has been passed on time,” said Jeff Graley, founder and president of Dayton defense contractor Mile Two. “And often that comes with a government shutdown.”
The focus for contractors like him becomes how long a shutdown might persist.
“If it is protracted, that just means more and more delays, which can have an impact,” Graley said.
Generally during shutdowns, military personnel on active duty, including Reserve personnel on active-duty status, are expected to continue to report for duty.
Health care and health insurance coverage for civilian employees continues in the event of a funding lapse, a spokesman for the Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base said. Elective procedures may be impacted.
“We are currently engaged in prudent planning to prepare for an orderly federal government shutdown, should a lapse of appropriations occur,” said Richard Hoiles, a spokesman for AFMC at Wright-Patterson.
Moves to military duty stations covered by activities excepted from the shutdown will continue.
“Only the minimum number of civilian employees necessary to carry out excepted activities will be excepted from furlough,” says a September 2025 Department of Defense planning document reviewed by the Dayton Daily News.
The document adds that civilian “positions that provide direct support to excepted (military) positions may also be deemed excepted if they are critical to performing the excepted activity.”
The document advises: “Once the excepted activity work is completed, the (civilian employee) individual should be furloughed using shutdown procedures.”
About 83,500 workers in Ohio were employed by the federal government at the end of 2024, which equates to about 1.5% of the state’s nonfarm payrolls, the Dayton Daily News reported earlier this year.
Before Trump administration efforts to shrink the federal workforce, there were about 38,000 military and civilian employees at Wright-Patterson and about 2,355 full-time employees at the Dayton VA Medical Center.
The base, in fact, was the largest single-site employer in Ohio, with thousands of defense contractors working on the base and outside its fence, many of them in Beavercreek and Fairborn and elsewhere.
How many people work on the base today, nearly 10 months into the second Trump administration, is unclear. A spokesman for AFMC said Monday precise numbers may have to come from the Department of the Air Force.
But by the end of calendar-year 2025, there will be 300,000 fewer federal workers on the government payroll than there were at the start of the calendar year, Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, told the New York Times in August.
More recently on the social media site X, Kupor wrote that some federal agencies are “doing limited (we are talking a few hundred people out of 150,000+ DRPr’s) re-hiring of employees.”
“DPR” is a reference to the Trump administration’s “Deferred Resignation Program,” the program that allowed eligible federal employees to resign at a certain date.
“That’s par for the course in any organizational restructuring — nobody achieves 100% perfection in all cases," Kupor wrote on X.
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