Interior Secretary Sally Jewell warned of the potential for a government-shutdown fight early and often during a Tuesday morning breakfast with reporters, repeatedly emphasizing the need for consistent funding and the damage caused by lapses in it.

“It is very frustrating to not have any certainty at all about whether the programs we have in place will continue,” Jewell said during her opening statement at the Christian Science Monitor breakfast in Washington D.C.

Government funding runs out on October 1 and Congress has yet to pass legislation providing for the next fiscal year. House Republicans have passed appropriations bills for the whole executive branch out of committee, but Senate Democrats have vowed to block the legislation in order to increase overall spending. And now, with Planned Parenthood under fire for the apparent sale of fetal organs, some House conservatives are refusing to back any spending bill that does not defund the nation’s largest abortion provider.

Jewell said that the Interior Department is preparing for a showdown. “We have to do shutdown planning; unfortunately we’re getting pretty good at that,” she said.

#share#When the government shut down in 2013, Jewell’s team came under fire after the National Park Service (NPS) closed the parks and barricaded monuments in D.C., even as groups of World War II veterans tried to visit. Internal emails revealed NPS “busily monitoring the news for any bad publicity and making shutdown exceptions for their co-workers.”

Jewell suggested that she might collaborate with state governors to keep at least some state parks open, but added that the parks would be a “visible” sign of the shutdown. “Two years ago, I did work with a number of governors who recognize that the national parks and public lands were critical to their economies and the economies of a number of their communities, and should there be another shutdown, that situation will not change,” she said. “It is very, very important that Congress not go down that path again. If they do, certainly the national parks will be visible but there is so much more that is not visible in these shutdowns that they need to pay attention to.”