In spite of the Friday night passage of an eleventh hour, one-week stopgap spending bill to continue funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the department posted a lapse-of-funding notice and shut-down procedures on its website apparently intended if the last minute efforts failed. While the notice is not listed on the home page, the blog, or the list of DHS publications, it was originally posted around nine o’clock Friday night and remained at this link as of the time of publication of this article:
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The text of the notice reads as follows:
The notice includes a link to a publication entitled Procedures Relating to a Lapse in Appropriations dated Friday, February 27, that spells out detailed procedures on how a funding lapse would handled throughout the department. The forty-seven page document instructs various DHS agencies how to determine which employees would be exempt from furlough, how a cessation of activities should be phased in, what incidents would trigger an employee recalls, and how regular activities would be resumes upon the conclusion of any hiatus. For instance, of the 59,546 employees of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 53,288 employees (89.5 percent) would be classified as exempt from furlough.
Since the stopgap funding measure only covers one week, the posted procedures may be needed as early as next Friday at midnight. DHS has not responded to an inquiry regarding the early posting of the notice.
