The Shutdown Ritual: How America Learned to Stop Governing and Embrace the Crisis
By law, Congress is supposed to pass twelve separate appropriations bills each year, each tied to a broad area of government. They cover everything from defense to transportation, foreign affairs to health and education. Together, they provide the discretionary funding that keeps federal agencies operating. In practice, Congress almost never passes all twelve on time. Instead it relies on temporary continuing resolutions to keep the government running at current levels while negotiations drag on. Shutdowns occur when those stopgaps collapse.
The country has endured 22 of them since 1976. Another one may begin on October 1st. When it does, parts of the federal system will go dark, others will limp along, and millions of people will be caught in the gaps. Understanding what actually happens during a shutdown requires looking past the political theater to the machinery underneath. The mechanics matter because they reveal something larger about how we govern ourselves, or fail to, and what we risk each time we let this happen.
A Bureaucratic Hiccup Becomes a Weapon
For most of American history, agencies kept working when Congress missed a deadline. Budgets were eventually passed, bills settled, and the machinery of government kept humming. The absence of appropriations was treated as a paperwork problem, not a constitutional crisis. That changed in 1980, when Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued a legal opinion interpreting the Antideficiency Act of 1870, a law that bars federal agencies from spending money not appropriated by Congress. Civiletti's opinion meant that when appropriations lapsed, agencies had to stop all "non-essential" operations. Overnight, what had once been a bureaucratic hiccup became a constitutional standoff with real consequences.
“What began as an arcane legal interpretation became a weapon of brinkmanship, deployed with increasing frequency by whichever party believed it had less to lose. Legislating gave way to leveraging. Compromise became capitulation. The ordinary work of funding government was weaponized to the point where failure is no longer exceptional but expected.”
The timing matters. Civiletti issued his opinion during a period of growing distrust between the executive and legislative branches, in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, when Congress was reasserting its power of the purse. The legal interpretation was technically sound, but it armed future Congresses with a weapon they would learn to deploy with increasing frequency and decreasing concern for collateral damage.
The evolution tells a story about American governance. In the 1980s, shutdowns were accidents, miscalculations in ordinary negotiations. By the 1990s, they had become strategic choices, ways to force concessions on contested policies. The 21-day battle between President Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990s defined the politics of an era. The 35-day standoff in 2018 and 2019, when President Trump demanded funding for a border wall and refused to blink, became the longest in American history. Brief shutdowns designed to make a point gave way to longer, more destructive ones as partisan polarization deepened. What began as an arcane legal interpretation became a weapon of brinkmanship, deployed with increasing frequency by whichever party believed it had less to lose. Legislating gave way to leveraging. Compromise became capitulation. The ordinary work of funding government was weaponized to the point where failure is no longer exceptional but expected.
The Arbitrary Line Between Essential and Expendable
When a shutdown begins, the government must distinguish between essential and non-essential services. The distinction proves less intuitive than you might imagine. National parks close their gates, not because maintaining trails requires daily appropriations but because the law treats recreation as expendable. Museums shutter, cutting off access to the Smithsonians and the National Archives. Research projects are suspended mid-stream, with scientists furloughed and experiments left unfinished. Loan applications through the Small Business Administration stop. A restaurant owner three days from closing on an SBA loan watches the deal collapse because no one is available to process the paperwork. IRS call centers go silent and routine audits are suspended, even as tax season deadlines remain fixed. Environmental inspections and workplace safety checks are halted unless they involve imminent threats, a standard so narrow it excludes most proactive enforcement. Federal grant programs, from housing assistance to nutrition support, go into pause, cutting off funding streams that state and local governments depend on. Courts can operate briefly on reserve funds but soon scale back to emergencies only, postponing immigration hearings and tax disputes and deepening already unconscionable delays.
Other operations continue, though. Social Security checks are mailed because they are funded through permanent appropriations, a quirk of legislative history that makes the program shutdown-proof. Medicare continues to reimburse hospitals for the same reason. The military remains on duty, its personnel required to report without knowing when they will be paid. The FBI, DEA, Border Patrol, and other law enforcement agencies continue their operations under the same terms. Air traffic controllers guide flights, TSA officers staff checkpoints, FEMA responds to disasters, and the Postal Service delivers mail because it is self-funded and therefore exempt from the appropriations process. These are the functions classified as essential, a designation that sounds definitive but turns out to be surprisingly fluid.
The boundaries can be arbitrary to the point of absurdity. A park ranger helping lost hikers is non-essential. The same ranger fighting a wildfire is essential. An IRS worker reviewing a standard return is furloughed, while one chasing a fraud case must report. A food safety inspector checking meat processing plants is essential, but one inspecting produce is not, a distinction that makes no epidemiological sense. These categories, imposed by the Antideficiency Act, illustrate not only the difficulty of classifying government work but also the contradictions of governing by crisis. The system forces agencies to draw lines that make little practical sense, separating tasks that in ordinary circumstances flow together as part of the same mission.
We have created a system in which we declare certain government functions expendable while simultaneously claiming government itself is indispensable. We tell federal workers their jobs matter enough to require them at checkpoints and disaster sites, but not enough to pay them on time. We insist that national security cannot wait, but routine fraud investigations can. We suspend environmental enforcement while keeping military operations fully funded, as if pollution respects political timelines. These contradictions expose the hollowness at the center of shutdown politics: the pretense that we can operate a modern government on an intermittent basis, turning services on and off like a light switch, without consequence.
Work Without Pay, Loss Without Remedy
For federal employees, shutdowns mean either furlough or working without pay. Roughly 800,000 people fall into these categories during major lapses, a number that represents not just workers but families, mortgages, car payments, and all the ordinary financial obligations that do not pause for political theater. The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 guarantees that they will eventually receive back pay. That guarantee, however, does little to help with bills that come due during the shutdown itself. An air traffic controller in Chicago faces a choice during the 2018-2019 shutdown: show up for an unpaid shift guiding passenger jets through winter weather, or stay home and risk disciplinary action. He shows up. His mortgage payment bounces anyway.
Contractors have it even worse, too. The janitors, cafeteria workers, security guards, and engineers who maintain federal facilities are not guaranteed retroactive pay. They simply lose the income. Small and mid-sized firms that rely on federal contracts often lack the reserves to weather weeks of lost revenue. When the shutdown ends, these workers and companies absorb the loss with no compensation, no apology, just the understanding that they will be expected to show up again when Congress decides to function. The inequity is stark. Federal employees at least have the promise of eventual payment. Contractors have nothing but the assurance that the same thing will probably happen again next year.
The indignity is compounded by the response. Federal workers are told to be patient, to understand that their sacrifice serves a larger political purpose, though that purpose is rarely articulated with any clarity. They are praised as essential while being treated as expendable. Contractors are told nothing at all. They are collateral damage in a fight that has little to do with them and everything to do with leverage and posturing. The message is unmistakable: your work matters enough to require, but not enough to pay for on time.
Seven Billion Dollars a Week, Gone
The economic costs extend far beyond the workforce. Each week of shutdown drains about $7 billion dollars from the economy, a figure that includes lost productivity, delayed contracts, and economic activity that simply evaporates. The 2018-2019 shutdown resulted in $11 billion in total losses, including $3 billion that was permanently lost; gone not just delayed. These are not abstract figures. They represent real economic activity: contracts unfulfilled, projects delayed, services suspended, transactions that never happen.
State and local governments feel the impact through delayed federal grants and suspended programs. Rural hospitals wait for reimbursements, their cash flow strained by the same political fight happening hundreds of miles away in Washington. Police departments lose access to federal training programs. Transportation projects stall as federal highway funds are held in limbo. Gateway communities around Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and Yosemite see tourism collapse overnight. Restaurants empty out, hotels cancel reservations, and seasonal workers are sent home early. The effects ripple outward in ways that are hard to predict and harder to quantify, exposing how deeply federal operations are embedded in daily American life.
The patience of the public is not infinite, either. Eventually people begin to ask why a government that cannot fund itself should be trusted with anything more complex. The question is fair, and the answer from Washington has been notably unsatisfying. Politicians offer justifications that sound principled in press conferences but ring hollow when measured against the consequences. The shutdown is necessary to defend fiscal responsibility, they say, even as it costs billions. It is essential to take a stand on policy, they insist, even when the policy in question has nothing to do with the appropriations bill being held hostage. The logic collapses under scrutiny, but by then the damage is done.
“Confidence in Washington has been eroding for decades, driven by scandals, gridlock, and the sense that institutions designed to solve problems have become problems themselves. Shutdowns accelerate the decline.”
Learned Helplessness, Dressed Up as Pragmatism
Each shutdown sends a message that government cannot perform its most basic function: to fund itself. Confidence in Washington has been eroding for decades, driven by scandals, gridlock, and the sense that institutions designed to solve problems have become problems themselves. Shutdowns accelerate the decline. Dysfunction becomes routine. Routine dysfunction makes government appear broken. What once shocked the public has become another predictable crisis, staged at regular intervals, resolved only at the last moment or after weeks of disruption.
We no longer ask whether Congress will pass a budget on time. We ask how long the shutdown will last and what concessions will be extracted. We plan around failure. Agencies stockpile funding, employees brace for furloughs, and the public shrugs at headlines announcing yet another lapse. We call this pragmatism, but learned helplessness is closer to the truth. Other democracies manage to fund themselves without annual crises. We have chosen this problem. The system does not require it.
Trust in institutions depends on their ability to perform ordinary tasks reliably. When the most basic function of government becomes a partisan battleground, it undermines the legitimacy of everything else government attempts. If Congress cannot keep the lights on, why should citizens believe it can address climate change, reform healthcare, or manage international crises? The logic is unforgiving. Each shutdown makes the next one more likely by demonstrating that the costs are bearable, that the public will tolerate disruption, and that there are no real penalties for failure.
The damage extends beyond public perception. Agencies spend months preparing contingency plans instead of focusing on their missions. Employees grow cynical, morale plummets, and talented people leave for private sector jobs that offer the novelty of regular paychecks and the dignity of knowing their work will not be interrupted by political theater. The institutional memory and expertise that make government function erode with each cycle. What remains is a system perpetually bracing for the next crisis, unable to think beyond the immediate deadline, incapable of long-term planning. Institutions do not die with a bang. They die with a series of entirely predictable failures that eventually become background noise.
Democracies depend on institutions that work predictably, not heroically. They require boring competence, the unglamorous work of keeping systems running without drama. Shutdowns are governance as performance, designed to extract concessions and demonstrate resolve, with little regard for the collateral damage. The more we normalize this, the more we accept that government exists not to serve but to stage fights about its own existence. That acceptance makes government weaker, less capable, less trusted. And it makes citizens more cynical, more willing to believe that all politics is theater and all politicians are equally culpable.
The Threshold We Are Approaching
This year's standoff fits the pattern. The deadline arrives on October 1st. If no deal is reached, the machinery of government will slow again, repeating a cycle that has become too familiar. Some services will continue, others will halt, and millions of Americans will feel the effects in ways large and small. The true cost is harder to measure: the erosion of trust in institutions, the perception that government cannot manage even its simplest task, the growing fragility of democratic machinery that depends on steady, ordinary competence.
Shutdowns are not about saving money or controlling waste. The fiscal arguments are pretense. They cost more than they save and disrupt more than they discipline. They test whether government can keep its doors open, whether the people we elect can perform the most basic function of their jobs. The more often that answer is no, the more fragile the system becomes.
The fix is simple in theory and nearly impossible in practice: pass a budget on time. Fund the government without theatrics, without hostage-taking, without treating the basic operations of the state as leverage in unrelated political fights. Other democracies manage this. We used to as well. We have chosen to normalize dysfunction, to treat competence as optional, to accept that keeping the lights on is somehow too much to ask.
The question is not whether the next shutdown will come, but how many more cycles we can endure before dysfunction becomes permanent, before the expectation of failure hardens into a condition we cannot reverse, before citizens stop believing their government is capable of anything beyond managing its own crises. Each shutdown moves us closer to a threshold where the inability to govern becomes the defining feature of our politics. Once crossed, that threshold is difficult to reverse. We may be closer to it than we think.
Sources, Resources, and Suggested Reading:
“Antideficiency Act (31 U.S.C. §§ 1341, 1342, 1517),” U.S. Government Accountability Office.
“History of Federal Government Shutdowns: 1980–2023,” Congressional Research Service, updated September 2023.
“Government Shutdown: Causes, Processes, and Effects,” Congressional Research Service, September 28, 2023.
“Government Shutdowns: What They Are and What They Mean for You,” U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Guidance.
“Frequently Asked Questions During a Shutdown Furlough,” U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
“Federal Budget Process,” U.S. Government Accountability Office.
“Federal Funding Gaps: A Brief Overview,” Congressional Research Service.
“The Effects of the Partial Shutdown Ending in January 2019,” Congressional Budget Office, January 2019.
“Federal Government Shutdowns: Background Information,” National Archives.
“Public Trust in Government: 1958–2023,” Pew Research Center.
“2019 Government Employee Fair Treatment Act (S.24),” U.S. Congress, January 16, 2019.
“OMB Circular No. A-11, Section 124: Agency Operations in the Absence of Appropriations,” U.S. Office of Management and Budget, July 2023.
“Federal Government Shutdowns: Effects on Employees and Contractors,” Congressional Research Service.
“National Park Service Visitation and Economic Contributions, 2024,” National Park Service.
“A Timeline of Government Shutdowns,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 2019.
“Shutdowns Are Now a Part of Governing,” The Atlantic, January 2019.
“U.S. Economy Lost $11 Billion During Longest Shutdown,” Congressional Budget Office, January 2019; Reuters coverage, January 28, 2019.
“Shutdown Politics and the Erosion of Institutional Trust,” The Hill, September 2025.
“Government Shutdown Deadline: Trump, Democrats Fail to Reach Deal,” USA Today, September 29, 2025.
“Shutdown Standoff: What’s at Stake for Federal Agencies,” Reuters, September 29, 2025.
