The Congressional Budget Office estimates that roughly 750,000 federal employees could be furloughed each day of a shutdown, with the total daily cost of their compensation at roughly $400 million, according to an analysis of federal agencies' latest contingency plans and the Office of Personnel Management.
The estimate released Tuesday comes in response to Sen. Joni Ernst's request for an analysis of the impact of what she calls a "Schumer Shutdown" which includes a series of questions about how much damage to the economy would be caused and the expected daily costs to the federal government in lost efficiencies.
"The effects of a shutdown depend on its duration and on an Administration's decisions about how to proceed," the CBO says in its Tuesday analysis, largely using work CBO published in 2019 after the five-week partial shutdown from December 22, 2018, until January 25, 2019.
WATCH LIVE: Senate gavels in as Congress speeds toward shutdown deadline
The government will shut down at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday if the Senate does not pass a House measure that would extend federal funding for seven weeks while lawmakers finish their work on annual spending bills.