How a construction or specialty-trade employer operates
A construction or specialty-trade employer earns its revenue by putting a crew on a site that an owner controls, under a permit a building department issues, with materials a supplier delivers, alongside trades other contractors employ, and is paid only when inspections pass and the owner's project proceeds. Every one of those steps happens at a place, with a counterparty, on an input that a governmental order can reach, and every one of them was reached. The ten functions below are the operation the Suspension Clause asks about, stated in terms an order can touch. The Suspension Clause is section 2301(c)(2)(A)(ii)(I) of the CARES Act and section 3134(c)(2)(A)(ii)(I) of the Internal Revenue Code; it is read element by element at The Law: the statute. In this analysis the "Service" is the Internal Revenue Service, the "United States" is the Government as litigant, the "Notice" is Notice 2021-20, 2021-11 I.R.B. 922, and the "Library" is this site's Orders Library.
JS, job sites
The job site is where the trade or business operates. A crew assembles at a fixed hour, receives the day's assignment at a toolbox talk, works from shared trailers, lifts, scaffolds, tools and trucks, and works within arm's reach of other trades in the same rooms, trenches and stairwells; interior finishing, mechanical, electrical and plumbing work is performed indoors, often in occupied buildings. An order that closes non-essential construction terminates the operation at the site. An order that confines construction to enumerated essential projects, that caps the number of persons on a residential site at four, that permits only tasks that keep workers six feet apart, that requires a written exposure-control plan and a designated safety officer as a condition of work, that requires daily entry screening of "employees, contractors, suppliers, and any other individuals entering a worksite," that imposes airborne-transmission controls indoors, face coverings among them, or that excludes exposed and infected workers with pay for ten to fourteen days, changes what the site does and how many people can do it there.1
PM, permits, inspections and plan review
No project begins without a permit, proceeds without inspections at fixed stages (footings, framing, rough mechanical, electrical and plumbing, insulation, final), or closes without a certificate of occupancy; plan review, zoning approvals, variances and recorded documents run through counters at building departments, planning boards and county recorders. When those counters closed to the public, when boards stopped meeting in person, when a city stopped accepting land-use applications, when a recorder accepted deeds only from title companies, or when inspections were suspended or converted to affidavits and video, every project that depended on them was delayed by order.2
BD, bidding, site visits and meetings
Work is won through pre-bid conferences and mandatory site walk-throughs, public bid openings, owner-architect-contractor meetings, subcontractor coordination meetings and, on public work, board and council meetings that award contracts. Gathering caps of ten, prohibitions on in-person meetings, telework mandates on owners, architects and agencies, suspensions of open-meetings requirements and interstate travel quarantines reached each of those events in terms.3
SC, materials and supply
Every trade depends on delivered materials: lumber and engineered wood, steel, concrete and aggregate, drywall, roofing, wire, pipe, fixtures, windows, doors, HVAC equipment and electrical gear, much of it manufactured in other States or imported through the land borders and the ports. Orders that closed sawmills, wood product plants and lumber wholesalers, that closed manufacturing outside critical infrastructure in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Washington, California and elsewhere, that closed the paint, flooring and garden departments of large retailers, that allocated scarce materials under the Defense Production Act, that restricted the land borders and conditioned every vessel arrival, and that capped prices along the chain of distribution reached the supply of every site.4
SB, subcontractors and trades
A general contractor performs little of the work with its own forces; the electrical, mechanical, plumbing, concrete, framing, drywall, painting and roofing scopes are subcontracted, and a specialty contractor in turn depends on the general contractor's schedule and on the other trades' progress. An order on a site binds every trade on it (Pennsylvania's headcount cap was "inclusive of employees of both prime and sub contractors"; New York's HERO template reaches "contractors or subcontractors ... at any individual work site"; Executive Order 14042 reaches subcontractors "at any tier"), and an order that stops one trade stops the trades that follow it. The licensing boards that admit new contractors and journeymen closed their examinations and counters.5
OW, owners and agencies
The customer is the owner: a homeowner, a developer, a restaurant, hotel, retailer, office landlord, fitness operator, school district, hospital, university, transit agency, port, utility, municipality or federal agency. An order that closes the owner's premises to the public, caps its occupancy, suspends its elective procedures, sends its staff home, or conditions entry to its buildings on attestation, testing or vaccination reaches the contractor's operation on that owner's premises directly: fit-outs are postponed, occupied-building work is barred, capital budgets are frozen and site access is conditioned.6
HR, hiring, licensing and training
The industry hires by the project, through hiring halls, apprenticeship programs, trade schools and, for seasonal and specialty work, the H-2B program; it licenses contractors and journeymen through State boards whose examinations are administered by vendors in fixed-date sittings; its drivers hold commercial licenses and medical certificates issued at motor-vehicle offices; its new hires are onboarded by in-person verification of documents and by OSHA and site-specific training. The examination centers closed, the boards' counters closed, the motor-vehicle offices closed or went appointment-only, the consulates suspended routine visa services, the President suspended H-2B entry, the physical Form I-9 inspection was deferred, and every workplace standard added training and record-keeping duties.7
OP, office and project management
Estimating, scheduling, procurement, submittals, payroll, safety administration and project management are performed in offices by staff who also visit sites. Telework mandates, office-capacity caps, remote-work rules in occupational-safety standards, the indoor face-covering orders (occupational-health and airborne-transmission controls reaching "office buildings, breakrooms, hallways, cafeterias, meeting rooms") and exposure-prevention plans reached the office as they reached every other office in the State.8
WF, workforce availability
The workforce is hourly, mobile and largely male, commutes by truck and by transit, lives in the metros and across State lines, has school-age children, and works in crews that cannot substitute for an absent member without delay. Stay-at-home orders confined it; school and child-care closures kept parents home; quarantine and isolation orders removed exposed and infected workers for ten to fourteen days; paid-leave mandates compelled the employer to pay those absences; travel quarantines made every cross-border assignment a two-week absence; transit and conveyance orders reduced the commute and placed it under the federal face-covering requirement of the CDC's conveyance order, an airborne-transmission control the TSA's directives enforced; and, on reservations and in the territories, curfews and weekend lockdowns closed the roads.9
CB, the customer base
The industry's customers are every other industry on this site, every household and every level of government. Their closures, caps, re-tightenings and reinstatements, catalogued in the other industry analyses of The COVID Project and in the layer-by-layer inventory below, delayed, interrupted or terminated the building, renovation, fit-out, maintenance and repair work that follows their activity. Under Q&A-12's logic and the statute's text, an order that closes a customer's operation is an order limiting commerce, and a project suspended because of it is suspended due to that order.10
Revenue lines, seasonality and geography
Revenue is billed monthly against a schedule of values with retainage of five to ten percent held to completion; service and repair work is billed by the call; change orders are billed as approved. Nothing is billed for a site that is closed, an inspection that is not performed or an owner that has suspended the project. The construction season in the northern half of the country begins in March and April, the weeks the shutdown orders took effect, and the backlog of a spring lost is not recovered in the same year. The industry is concentrated in the metropolitan areas of the Northeast, the Great Lakes, Texas, Florida and the Pacific coast, where the State and local orders inventoried below were densest and lasted longest, and its workforce lives and commutes within those metros.11
The counterparty map
The counterparties of a construction employer, and the orders that reached each class, are these. Owners in every industry: the State and local closure, capacity, face-covering and vaccination orders on their premises and the federal workforce and contractor orders on federal owners (the fifty States, the metros and the counterparties). Building departments, planning boards and recorders: the closure and remote-operation orders of the cities and counties and the recording-office closures of the States (the sector regulators). Suppliers: the manufacturing closures, the Defense Production Act orders, the border and port instruments and the price rules (the ecosystem). Subcontractors and trades: the same site orders, and the licensing boards' closures. Licensing boards, examination vendors, motor-vehicle offices and consulates: their closures, waivers and suspensions (the sector regulators and the federal layer). Schools, child care and transit: the closure, face-covering and conveyance orders on which the workforce's availability turned. Courts and clerks: the closure, filing-suspension and remote-proceeding orders that governed lien, payment and contract disputes. The inventory below states each class with its exhibits.