Hey guys, it's Lauren Egan here at the bulwark. I want to do something a little bit different today.

I want to talk about the government shutdown. But instead of talking about what's going on in Capitol Hill and in Washington, D.C., I want to take the conversation outside of the Beltway and chat about what this means for people who live hundreds of miles away from D.C.

And to do that, I have Kansas City Mayor

Quentin Lucas here with me today. Mayor, thanks for joining. It is great to be with you and good

to talk to you about this. Yeah, I really appreciate it. So talk to me a little bit about Kansas City

and what, if any, significant federal employee base, Kansas City has and sort of how this is

impacting your city and like a big picture level? Well, as a threshold matter, I think what we can tell

you out of Kansas City is it does matter to everyday working people in the Midwest who live

a thousand miles away. First of all, we have 30,000 federal employees in the Kansas City area,

employees who care about their paychecks, employees who care about access to their health care,

and certainly a lot of constituents who are more impacted as well. So just as a sheer, like,

thing where people who are going to work want to make sure not only that they are getting

paid, but that they will get some pay that fills in what they have lost in the meantime.

This is something that's really vital and important for them.

And I think we all have shared frustration and the fact that this has not yet been figured out.

Do you guys have a lot of federal workers or what does that kind of look like? like who are those folks and what kind of jobs do they tend to do in Kansas City?

Yeah. So in cities like mine, cities like Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, so many others,

you actually have tens of thousands of federal employees. Kansas City's number is actually more

than 30,000. And so those

employees are working in areas like the Internal Revenue Service, because we all do still pay taxes.

And so we're doing important processing work with all of that. We have a lot of employees in

places, even like the National Weather Service, helping to predict storm activity in our region

...