This is Dominic Pino filling in for Jim Geraghty.
On the menu today: What actually happens (or doesn’t happen) when the government shuts down, and why Congress should change the law to prevent shutdowns from happening at all.
More Like a Government Mostly-Not-Shutdown
The federal government has been out of money since 1835. That was the last year in which the U.S. had no national debt. So it might seem a little silly to say that the government has to shut down because it ran out of money on October 1. And, well, it is silly.
Government shutdowns are not a requirement of the Constitution or of common sense. They are the product of the interaction of statutes that Congress can and should change. Government shutdowns don’t improve the quality of governance or the country’s fiscal health, and Congress should end them forever.
It’s not just because Democrats caused the ongoing shutdown. In 2023 when Republicans nearly caused a shutdown, I also argued that Congress should end shutdowns forever. There is simply no reason to pick arbitrary dates on which it suddenly matters that the government doesn’t have enough money to pay its bills, especially because most of what the government does keeps happening during shutdowns anyway.
The political calculation for shutdowns often includes the belief that voters will feel the pain and demand a way out, which the party that caused the shutdown hopes will mean granting its wishes. But most voters feel no pain. Social Security checks still go out, and Medicare and Medicaid coverage continues during government shutdowns. Those programs, plus interest payments on the national debt, which also continue to be made during shutdowns, account for about three-quarters of all federal spending.
Those programs, plus interest payments, are also the long-run drivers of the national debt. The rest of the federal budget is roughly balanced over the long run. That means that a lapse in government funding causes the balanced part of the budget to stop while the deficit-causing part continues as before. It’s nonsensical.
But even within the one-quarter of spending that is supposedly shut down, much of it continues. Active-duty military and federal law enforcement are included in ordinary appropriations, but they are deemed “essential” and continue to operate during shutdowns. What begins under the guise of financial considerations quickly becomes a somewhat arbitrary exercise in branding jobs “essential.”
What ends up happening is that some agencies have almost their entire workforce furloughed, while others are almost fully staffed, even though they are all covered under the same appropriations process that failed. In addition to the essential/nonessential determinations, agencies also have varying abilities to scrape together funding of their own, such as by exhausting self-funded revenue they may receive from payment of fees.
As of Monday, 93 percent of workers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were furloughed, but 0 percent of workers at the Smithsonian Institution were. Ninety-one percent of Securities and Exchange Commission workers were told to not come to work, but 98 percent of Treasury employees were still working. NASA? Obviously not that important, with 83 percent of workers furloughed. The Small Business Administration? Over three-quarters of workers still working.
All told, about a quarter of civilian federal employees were furloughed at the start of this shutdown, which is actually a lower proportion than normal. In past shutdowns, administrations had planned to furlough 35 to 40 percent of civilian federal employees.
For most of the furloughed employees, a government shutdown is basically a strange type of vacation, because the duration of that vacation is decided by Congress. Furloughed workers are not allowed to work or even be signed on to government computer networks. Far from being a harsh punishment of faceless bureaucrats, shutdowns are kind of nice for them while they last.
Furloughed and active employees both go unpaid during a shutdown. But they are legally entitled to back pay once the shutdown is over. The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act was passed unanimously by the Senate and by a 411–7 margin in the House in 2019 before receiving Donald Trump’s signature. It makes official what was already standard practice, since Congress realizes that the whole charade of shutdowns is not really the employees’ fault and they shouldn’t be punished.
If a shutdown lasts a week or so, most workers don’t even miss a paycheck. If they do miss one, most federal workers are well compensated, so they can dip into their personal savings for a bit until the government reopens and they’re made whole again.
In the end, most voters and federal workers don’t feel much pain from government shutdowns. (Federal contractors generally do not receive back pay, and they are among the only people who are hurt by shutdowns.) Rather than being a wake-up call about omnipresent federal fiscal recklessness, shutdowns are pointless political stunts that don’t even work for the politicians who start them. Rather than learning from Republicans’ repeated failures in this area, Democrats seem intent to learn the lesson on their own.
So what can Congress do to fix this system? Shutdowns happen because of a particular interpretation of the Antideficiency Act, which says that government agencies can’t spend money that hasn’t been appropriated by Congress. That law makes sense, but Congress doesn’t face very strong incentives to make sure appropriations are passed on time, since most of the government keeps functioning whether they meet their deadlines or not.
Several legislative proposals have sought to change those incentives. Representative Jodey Arrington (R., Texas) and Senator James Lankford (R., Okla.) introduced a bill that would automatically pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open for 14 days after funding lapses, while restricting travel by members of Congress and keeping Congress in session until appropriations are passed.
Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) introduced a bill that would automatically pass funding at 94 percent of the previous year’s level if the appropriations deadline passes. Then, every 90 days, funding would automatically be cut by 1 percent unless Congress passed a new appropriations package.
These measures would get lawmakers’ attention very quickly and would make shutdowns vanish. If members of Congress knew they wouldn’t be allowed to go home and would face automatic spending cuts if they refused to do their jobs by passing appropriations as the law prescribes, they would be much more scrupulous about their deadlines.
Government shutdowns are only one particularly acute manifestation of the federal government’s larger fiscal problems and broken budget system. They didn’t exist for most of the country’s history, and they have proven ineffective at changing the course of federal spending. Changing the incentives for members of Congress would change the outcomes for the American people.