After the government shut down, two people died when a small plane crashed outside a house in Ohio, seven died in a Florida highway collision, and almost two dozen others have perished in transportation accidents that federal safety investigators normally would have probed.

Instead, the investigators have been furloughed.

Story Continued Below

The sidelining of virtually all of the National Transportation Safety Board’s 397-person staff is part of an increasing crisis for American aviation as the shutdown drags on, including unpaid, overstressed air traffic controllers and TSA baggage screeners. The impasse is forcing the NTSB to be selective about which accidents it can investigate using unpaid employees, while delaying current investigations into incidents such as a fatal Southwest Airlines engine failure and the death of an Arizona pedestrian struck by a self-driving Uber.

The implications could extend well beyond the shutdown: The NTSB’s probes are important not just in pinpointing the cause of specific accidents but in making recommendations for preventing future ones.

The independent board has no regulatory or enforcement authority, but federal agencies and lawmakers take its advice seriously. The NTSB has issued more than 14,000 safety recommendations over the decades, about 80 percent of which have been adopted, board member Bella Dinh-Zarr said in a 2016 speech. Adopted recommendations include those on wind shear, avoiding midair collisions, smoke detectors, drinking laws, airbags, brake lights, commercial driver’s licenses, drug and alcohol testing for transportation jobs, and an anti-collision technology for railroads called positive train control.

When the shutdown concludes, the NTSB can go back and investigate the incidents that it has skipped during the past month. But by then, memories and physical evidence will have deteriorated, said Christopher Hart, a former board chairman.

“A lot of the key evidence that they’re looking for is definitely perishable, and that’s why time is of the essence when these crashes occur,” Hart said.

Though most investigations can take over a year to conclude, the NTSB can make urgent recommendations if it finds a problem. In 2009, for instance, after a Metro train slammed into another train in Washington, D.C., killing nine people, NTSB discovered an issue with the trains’ electronic signals.

“Our concern was that other mass transit systems in the country that had similar detection software might also be encountering the same problem,” Hart said. “So that’s why long before the accident investigation report was complete on that one, we put out an urgent recommendation saying, ‘You need to check your system and see whether it also had this’” issue.

Dolline Hatchett, the acting director of the NTSB’s Office of Safety Recommendations and Communications, said the agency is “missing prevention opportunities.” Evidence from accidents “could potentially support safety recommendations that, once adopted, could prevent future accidents and save countless lives.”

“The NTSB wants to ensure safety across the transportation spectrum, and we are unable to do that as long as this shutdown continues,” Hatchett said.

Ninety accidents have occurred mostly in the United States since late December that, under ordinary circumstances, the NTSB would have at least considered investigating. For about 60 of those, the extent of the agency’s probe would mostly be to gather data. But in more than 20 instances — including more than a dozen aviation accidents the agency must investigate by statute — the NTSB would have sent investigators to the site immediately after the incident.

In one instance, it’s had to call in help from overseas. Earlier this week, a small plane went missing somewhere between France and the United Kingdom and is presumed to have crashed in international waters. On board was a pilot and a professional soccer player. Typically, the NTSB would take the lead in the investigation because the plane was registered in the United States. Instead, the agency has asked its counterpart in the United Kingdom to step in.

For five accidents, the shutdown hampered NTSB so much that it couldn’t collect enough evidence to decide whether an investigation was warranted, including a freight train derailment in Kansas that killed one person.

The NTSB has recalled some of its investigators to work without pay, but almost exclusively to assist other countries.

The agency called in a handful of investigators to help Indonesia analyze the cockpit voice recording from a crash last year in which a Boeing 737 MAX plunged into the ocean minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, leaving 189 dead. It recalled another investigator at the request of the State Department to provide “on-scene support” to Mexico’s Directorate General of Civil Aeronautics after a state governor and her husband, a former governor, were killed in a helicopter crash. An investigator is also “overseeing the disassembly and examination” of a U.S.-made engine that failed on a Korean Air flight.

In those cases, NTSB is “focused on addressing any potential aviation safety concerns that could immediately threaten the safety of human life or the protection of property,” and is therefore complying with the rules for recalling workers from furlough, Hatchett said.

But other investigations that were underway before the shutdown have come to a halt. Those include the derailment of an Amtrak train in Washington state that killed three people, natural gas explosions in Massachusetts that killed one person, the collapse of a pedestrian bridge in Florida that killed six and a limousine crash in New York state in which 20 people died.

Hart warned that the furloughs could cause long-term harm to the NTSB by frustrating dedicated investigators who may look for other jobs.

“These are dogged detectives who don’t like to leave things undetermined,” Hart said. “And I’m frankly concerned that we may lose some of them because they may go on to other areas where they don’t have this kind of uncertainty. These are all highly trained people that could earn a lot more money in industry, but they don’t because they love what they do.”

The lingering government shutdown means justice, in many cases, is grinding to a halt.

Fewer than half of the staff members in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice are considered “essential,” erasing their presence from dozens of cases nationwide. That’s prompted judges to press pause on cases deciding the fate of issues ranging from how to treat sexual harassment cases on college campuses to whether federally sanctioned mining operations will sink canoeing businesses in Minnesota.

Story Continued Below

The freeze has already put major parts of the Trump agenda into limbo as government lawyers are no longer available to argue their legality. Whether the delay helps or hurts White House priorities varies case by case, however, and the shutdown’s effect has been uneven nationally as judges allow delays in some cases but not others.

The federal court system will have exhausted stopgap attempts to stay open as of Feb. 1, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts said this week. At that point, the country’s 94 district courts and 13 courts of appeals will have to decide which staff to furlough and which to bring in to work without pay, a spokesperson told POLITICO. Criminal cases would still proceed, but there would be no money to pay jurors the required $50-a-day stipend, the spokesperson said.

Courts have already suspended payments to attorneys appointed to represent defendants unable to hire their own lawyer.

“If the Judiciary does run out of funding, reversing many of these urgent stopgap measures once a shutdown ended would be a major organizational challenge affecting virtually every federal court and defender’s office,” the spokesperson said.

The White House and Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Some judges have rebuked government attorneys for their requests to delay cases.

“Such lapses are not in any sense government ‘policy,’” Judge William Young of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts wrote in several recent orders denying delay requests. “They are simply an abdication by the President and the Congress (which could override a presidential veto) of the duty to govern responsibly to the end that all laws may be faithfully executed.”

The shutdown “does not constitute ‘good cause’ for any stay,” Young continued. “In fact, it is laughable.”

That means in cases that are still being heard and at which DOJ lawyers are no longer present, plaintiffs find they are literally arguing with themselves.

“We are challenging unlawful actions by the government,” said Tania Galloni, managing attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental group opposed to the administration’s regulatory rollbacks. “The government’s position is, ‘We can’t talk about that right now because we decided not to fund ourselves.‘ It is pretty outrageous.”

The Justice Department did win an indefinite stay of all cases in a Georgia district court, including a lawsuit challenging reservoir operations on the Chattahoochee River, the subject of a legal fight among Alabama, Florida and Georgia since 1990. Galloni said a DOJ stay request was granted by the court in all cases before Earthjustice knew about it. Earthjustice has asked a district court in Tampa to limit how long the Justice Department can delay proceedings on a federal lawsuit filed by environmentalists involving oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, Galloni said.

‘What a mess’

In another example, the fate of Obamacare is now on hold after an appellate court halted its review of a lawsuit that could kill the entire 2010 health care law.

A federal judge in Texas last month ruled Obamacare is unconstitutional, throwing into jeopardy coverage for about 20 million Americans and potentially upending large swaths of the health care system. A coalition of Democratic attorneys general defending Obamacare have asked the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to quickly overturn the decision, but the appellate court — at the Trump administration’s request — paused the lawsuit earlier this month due to a lack of federal funding.

The move will drag out the legal fight over the law, which could wind up before the Supreme Court during the run-up to the 2020 election.

Obamacare remains in effect while the lawsuit works through the court system, and many legal experts expect the Texas judge’s decision will eventually be overturned. But Democrats who ran on a health care-heavy message in 2018 are sweating the latest legal threat to the law.

“Putting the [Affordable Care Act] in jeopardy imperils nearly every American,” said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who is leading the appeal, in a statement to POLITICO. “For the sake of America’s families, the misguided lawsuit against the ACA must be resolved quickly.”

Every day government attorneys are unavailable is a day counterparties can’t receive important information through discovery or freedom of information requests, said Katherine McGerald, executive director of SurvJustice, a group challenging in the U.S. District Court of Northern California changes the Trump administration made to Title IX sexual discrimination procedures on college campuses.

The court granted DOJ lawyers’ request to halt the case because of the shutdown. But it also agreed with SurvJustice that the government will need to offer a “status report” on Tuesday and could resume the case even if administration lawyers aren’t available.

“We understand” that government lawyers are bound by the rules of the shutdown, McGerald said. “But this can’t go on forever, or it will impact the case.”

A closely watched legal fight over Harvard University’s use of race in admissions could also come to a halt. With no sign of the government restarting, it’s an open question whether a hearing scheduled for next month will occur.

Asked what might happen if the shutdown is still going by then, Edward Blum, who leads Students for Fair Admissions, the anti-affirmative action group suing Harvard, replied: “No one knows. What a mess.”

Playing into the opposition’s hands

In other cases, the lack of administration lawyers has played right into opposing parties’ hands.

The lack of government attorneys has already thrown more confusion into when pipeline developer TransCanada will be able to build its controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline. President Donald Trump campaigned on getting the pipeline built after the Obama administration quashed it over environmental issues, but the project remains mired in the courtroom after green groups challenged the way Trump’s State Department issued permits.

Now, the Justice Department attorneys who regularly flew to the federal courtroom in Great Falls, Mont., have been furloughed, leaving TransCanada alone to defend the project in a Montana courtroom.

That means no one from the government is available to answer questions as to how long it might take the State Department to redo the challenged permits, a key question TransCanada wants answered, said Doug Hayes, senior attorney for the Sierra Club, one of the environmental groups involved in the case.

“The question is for the government, but there‘s no one there,” Hayes said of the latest hearing.

In another example, a judge for the U.S. District Court in South Carolina granted government lawyers their shutdown-related request to delay a case a group of communities filed against the Commerce Department over its granting of seismic survey permits in November. The department’s action would allow companies to survey for undersea oil and gas reserves off the Atlantic coast.

But the judge also ruled that during the delay, the Interior Department, which oversees offshore drilling, cannot issue its own survey permits until the government reopens.

That delay has given lawmakers opposing offshore drilling breathing room to work on legislation intended to block federal efforts to expand oil production into the Atlantic, said Alan Hancock, energy and climate advocacy director at environmental group Coastal Conservation League.

“As the shutdown continues, and the seismic permits aren’t being issued, progress continues at the statehouse,” Hancock said. “While the court system is on hold, state governments are moving on this.”

Not off the hook

In-house judicial proceedings at the Securities and Exchange Commission are on hold, and the U.S. Tax Court has canceled 18 hearings so far. A number of lawsuits against EPA have also been put on ice because of the shutdown, according to a POLITICO review of court records. That includes challenges to rules related to haze in Texas, refrigerant leaks and pollution liability for power plants. At least three lawsuits seeking communications, ethics documents and financial records for former Administrator Scott Pruitt have also been stayed.

But judges are not letting EPA off the hook every time. In at least five cases, federal judges told EPA the shutdown is not a good enough reason to delay legal proceedings, at least for now.

The courtroom isn’t the only place where the lack of funds has forced the Justice Department to cut corners. The absence of some furloughed workers at the FBI — housed within the department — meant those still showing up couldn’t do their jobs.

One FBI employee working on cases against MS-13 gang members complained that the shutdown meant no direct access to a Spanish interpreter to translate messages from an informant.

“Since the shutdown, I have not had a Spanish speaker in the Division,” one agent wrote in an FBI official collection of employee shutdown stories. “We have several Spanish-speaking informants. We are only able to communicate using a three-way call with a linguist in another division.”

Toby Eckert, Patrick Temple-West and Benjamin Wermund contributed to this report.