Hundreds of Millions of Work Hours Lost During the U.S. Shutdown

While hundreds of thousands of federal employees will eventually get their back pay after the U.S. government shutdown that ended Jan. 25, their production may be forever lost.

The closure may have deprived the economy of more than 300 million work hours that would have come from furloughed workers and contractors during the longest shutdown on record.

That calculation is based on adding the estimated more than 380,000 furloughed employees and 1.2 million contractors who would have been working, and multiplying by the most recent figure for average weekly hours for federal workers from the Labor Department.

The tally ...