Tourists hang in balance as Congress mulls shutdown
By Harriet Baskas, CNBC
Gerda Stoof was delighted last week to be looking up at the 60-foot-tall stone faces of Mount Rushmore National Memorial near Keystone, South Dakota. She and her husband made a pit stop on their drive home from visiting new twin grandchildren in Ontario.
“I’ve heard about this all my life and have always wanted to see it,” said Stoof, a native of Alberta, Canada. They were unaware that if they’d shown up a week later, the gates to the site of the iconic granite sculpture may have been locked.
That’s because if Oct. 1 rolls around without the nation’s lawmakers settling a budget for the new fiscal year, there may be a partial government shutdown that would affect the nation’s more than 400 national parks and historic sites—including federal agencies that support tourism.
If there is a partial shutdown, it would cost the U.S. travel sector at least $185 million per day in lost economic output, U.S. Travel Association economists estimate. That could also lead to the loss of 530,000 travel-related jobs due to temporary layoffs, reduced wages and fewer hours worked.