Furlough

In the United States, a furlough (/ˈfɜːrloʊ/; from Dutch: verlof, "leave of absence") is a temporary leave of employees due to special needs of a company, which may be due to economic conditions at the specific employer or in the economy as a whole. These involuntary furloughs may be short or long term, and many of those affected may seek other temporary employment during that time.

In the United States, involuntary furloughs concerning federal government employees may be of a sudden and immediate nature. Such was the case in February 2010, when a single Senate objection prevented emergency funding measures from being implemented. As a result, 2000 federal workers for the Department of Transportation were immediately furloughed as of March 1, 2010. The longest such shutdown was December 16, 1995, to January 6, 1996, which affected all non-essential employees, shutting down many services including National Institutes of Health, visa and passport processing, parks, and many others. This happened again on October 1, 2013.

The United States Congress failed to pass a re-authorization of funding for the Federal Aviation Administration, and as a result, furloughed about 4,000 workers at midnight on July 22, 2011.

Congress was on the verge of forcing a government shutdown on April 8, 2011, if their plan to reduce the federal budget deficit was not resolved, which would have caused the furlough of 800,000 out of two million civilian federal employees.

The first federal government furloughs of 2013 went into effect as a result of budget sequestration (or sequester) - the automatic spending cuts in particular categories of federal outlays. (This procedure was first used in the Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Balanced Budget Act of 1985.) The sequesters were designed to take place if the federal deficit exceeded a set of fixed deficit targets. In 2013 specifically, sequestration refers to a section of the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) that was initially set to begin on January 1, 2013, as an austerity fiscal policy. These cuts were postponed by two months by the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 until March 1, when this law went into effect. At that time, most federal departments and agencies began furloughing their employees in order to meet their spending cut targets. For the Department of Defense, almost all of the civilian workforce as well as most full-time, dual-status military technicians of the National Guard and the Reserves were affected. The initial furlough requirement was 176 working hours per affected employee, which was later cut to 88 hours. Due to cost-cutting measures in other areas, this furlough was further reduced to a total of 48 working hours per DoD civilian and full-time Reserve Component member.

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