Credit: Morad Hegui/Adobe Stock
The partial shutdown of the U.S. federal government is suspending the work of 75% of the employees of the Employee Benefits Security Administration and forcing some to do their jobs without getting paid.
Most of the government shut down today because Congress failed to come to an agreement on an "appropriations" bill, or funding bill, that could pay for the government's general operations.
EBSA — a federal agency that writes and enforces federal health and retirement benefits regulations — is part of the U.S. Labor Department. Department officials reported in a shutdown contingency plan posted Friday that a shutdown would lead to furloughs for 504 of EBSA's 668 employees.
EBSA has separate funding for some activities, such as No Surprises Act surprise billing investigations, mental health and addiction treatment group health benefits parity investigations, and efforts to implement new laws, such as the price transparency section of the No Surprises Act, according to the contingency plan.
EBSA can also continue to fight fraud and respond to benefits problems that threaten people's safety, such as surgery prior authorization denials.
The Labor Department intends to keep enough payroll workers in the office to make sure that the workers at EBSA and other workers who are supposed to get paid will get paid.
But EBSA will suspend research activities, information technology support, audits and any compliance assistance activities that are not related to operations, such as surprise billing investigations, behavioral health parity investigations and efforts to implement laws, officials say.
What it means: The EBSA activities that tend to get the most attention from employers and benefits advisors might continue roughly as normal in spite of the shutdown.
The backdrop: The federal government has a fiscal year that runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30.
The law that has been funding general government operations expired at midnight Tuesday.
The House passed a temporary anti-shutdown bill by a narrow margin, but the bill died in the Senate.
The Senate needed 60 votes to pass the bill, but the final vote on the floor was 55-45.
Some Democrats crossed party lines to try to keep the government running, but Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., crossed party lines to oppose it, arguing that it keeps Biden-era spending levels in place.
Few Democrats voted for the bill because they are trying to use concerns about the government shutdown to get Republicans to keep the current, relatively high levels of Affordable Care Act health insurance premium tax credit subsidies in place.
Senate Republican leaders have said that they are open to keeping the current ACA subsidy levels in place but want to discuss that in separate negotiations.
Furlough details: One EBSA official, Daniel Aronowitz, the newly confirmed assistant Labor secretary who serves as the EBSA administration, can keep working because he is a presidential appointee, according to the Labor Department shutdown plan.
EBSA will keep 46 workers on the job, with promises to pay them later rather than paychecks, because they are classified as performing functions that are "necessary to protect life and property."
Another 117 EBSA workers can keep working, with a normal level of pay, because Congress has provided appropriations for their activities through legislation that's separate from the current appropriations bill debate.
Some of the workers who will still get paid are the ones working on enforcing and implementing the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act and the No Surprises Act.
The best-known part of the No Surprises Act is supposed to keep insured patients who get emergency care from out-of-network hospitals or insured patients who end up seeing out-of-network providers in in-network hospitals from getting unexpected bills for amounts not paid by their insurance.
A second part of the act sets health benefits broker compensation disclosure requirements.
Final broker comp regulations are supposed to show up in December, according to the Labor Department's official regulatory agenda, and the shutdown contingency plan suggests that the shutdown may not have a big impact on that project.
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