Here we go again. The federal government will shut down at midnight unless Congress agrees on a funding fix, which seems increasingly unlikely . While a lot of the national conversation is about who will take blame for yet another totally avoidable crisis, the signal often drowned out by that noise is that shutdowns are devastating to the Washington, DC, area.

Huge cuts to government employment and knock-on cuts in the private sector this year have already walloped the region’s economy, so any further interruption will hurt even worse, Terry Clower, who runs the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, told WTOP . A recent report on the area’s economy says greater Washington’s unemployment rate increased more than eight times the national rate. Removing one of the pi

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