#24 Why Congress Keeps Shutting the Government Down
On September thirtieth, the federal government runs out of money again. And here is the part almost nobody says out loud. Over the last twelve months, some piece of the government you pay for has been shut down for nearly half of them.
***
Twice in the last year, Washington shut the government down. Not over the same thing. The first time it was your health insurance. The second time it was the border. Same weapon, two different fights.
***
And there is a bill sitting on a shelf right now that would end this whole cycle for good. Both parties refuse to pass it. The reason they refuse is the part of this story nobody tells you.
***
A shutdown is not an accident. It is a weapon. And both parties like keeping it loaded.
***
Let me start with one number, because it tells you almost everything about how broken this has gotten. Since the current budget year began last October, some part of the federal government has gone without regular funding for one hundred and sixty one days. That is forty four percent of the year. Nearly half of the last twelve months, some agency, some department, some piece of the government you pay for, has been running on fumes or shut down completely.
***
Picture that as a business. Imagine a company that was closed almost half the year, still expected you to keep paying into it, still could not tell you if it would be open next month, and still handed its executives a full paycheck the whole time. You would call that company a failure. That company is your federal government, and I am not exaggerating for effect. That is the actual record.
***
Here is how we got there, and I want to walk it in order because the order matters. The budget year started on October first of last year. Congress could not agree on a funding bill, so the government shut down. That shutdown ran forty three days. It became the longest shutdown in American history. It ended in the middle of November, but it did not really end, because the deal that reopened the government only kicked the fight down the road a few weeks.
***
Then it happened again. In the winter, the government shut down a second time. This round hit the Department of Homeland Security the hardest, the department that runs the border, the airports, and immigration enforcement. That one dragged on for seventy six days. Seventy six. It became the longest shutdown of a single department in the history of the country. And the full year funding was not actually finished until June tenth of this year. So the government did not have a settled budget until we were more than halfway through the budget year.
***
That is the year behind us. Now look at the cliff in front of us. All of that fighting only funded the government through September thirtieth. That is the next deadline. And Congress is not exactly sprinting to meet it.
***
This week, the House of Representatives actually did its part. It passed a short term funding bill, what Washington calls a continuing resolution, by a vote of two hundred twenty to two hundred five. Six Democrats crossed over and voted for it. That bill keeps the government open at current spending levels and pushes the next deadline all the way to December fourth. And that date is not random. December fourth lands after the November midterm elections. The entire point of picking that date is to shove the fight past the election, so nobody has to explain a shutdown to voters while the voters are deciding who controls Congress.
***
So the House passed the bill, and then it did something very Washington. It left town. Both chambers are heading into a five week August break. When you add up the calendar, the August recess, Labor Day, and the September holidays, the House is scheduled to be in session for only about nineteen days before the September thirtieth deadline. Both chambers will be in Washington at the same time for as few as eleven days. Eleven days to fund the entire government of the United States.
***
And here is exactly where it sits tonight. That House bill is not law. A bill only becomes law when the House and the Senate both pass it and the President signs it. The House passed it. The Senate has not touched it. And in the Senate, a funding bill needs sixty votes to move. Sixty. Republicans do not hold sixty seats. Which means the bill cannot pass the Senate without Democratic votes. So the entire decision, the whole question of whether the government stays open, now sits in the hands of Senate Democrats.
***
The President is already calling it. On July twenty second, Donald Trump said flat out that the government is headed for a shutdown on September thirtieth. Not that it might. That it is. Whether he turns out to be right depends entirely on what a handful of senators decide to do with eleven days on the clock and a five week vacation standing between here and there.
***
Now let me tell you what a shutdown actually does, because the word gets thrown around so much that people have stopped picturing it. When the money runs out, federal workers get sorted into two piles. The first pile is called furloughed. Those workers get sent home and told not to work, and their pay stops. The second pile is called excepted. Those are the ones whose jobs are considered essential, so they are forced to keep showing up, but their pay gets withheld too. They work for free until it ends. In the last really long shutdown, about eight hundred thousand federal workers landed in one of those two piles. Roughly three hundred eighty thousand sent home, roughly four hundred twenty thousand working without a paycheck.
***
These are not abstractions. During that shutdown, federal workers stood in line at food banks in near freezing weather. One mother of three said she had to choose between paying for her chemotherapy and paying her rent. Air traffic controllers, the people who keep planes from hitting each other in the sky, were working unpaid. Enough of them started calling out sick that airports backed up across the country. In fact, it was the air traffic mess that finally forced the last long shutdown to end. That is what a shutdown really is. It is not a line on a budget sheet. It is people you depend on being told to work for nothing or go home broke.
***
And here is the part that should make your jaw tighten. Members of Congress keep getting paid during a shutdown. Their checks never stop. The people who cause the shutdown are the only people in the building guaranteed to get paid through it. The workers eat it. The travelers eat it. The taxpayer eats it. The politicians do not.
***
One quick thing before we move on, because people mix these two up constantly. This is not the debt ceiling. Those are two different fights. A shutdown is about whether Congress approves money to run the government day to day, to keep the offices open and the workers paid. The debt ceiling is a separate thing entirely. That is about whether the country is allowed to borrow money to pay bills it has already run up. A shutdown closes offices. Hitting the debt ceiling would mean the United States failing to pay debts it already owes, which is a far bigger and far scarier event. When you hear shutdown, picture closed offices and unpaid workers. That is what we are talking about tonight, not the debt ceiling.
***
One more thing you need to understand about how we keep ending up here, because it is the quiet failure under all of it. Congress is supposed to fund the government the boring way. Twelve separate spending bills, debated and passed one at a time, every single year, before the deadline. That is the job. That is what the Constitution hands them. They have not done it that way in decades. Instead they wait until the last minute, cram everything into one giant bill that nobody reads, or they punt with a short term patch like the one on the table right now. This year the House at least moved all twelve bills through committee and passed three of them on the floor. The Senate passed zero. Not one. So when you hear a shutdown is looming, understand it is not because the task is impossible. It is because the people we hired to do it did not do it, and then they left town.
***
That is where we are tonight. The House passed a patch. The Senate is sitting on it and needs sixty votes it does not have without Democrats. The calendar is nearly gone. And the President is already saying it is going to happen. The house is on fire, the fire department left for vacation, and the one hose long enough to reach it is sitting in a building that needs sixty people to agree before anybody will pick it up.
***
In the first segment I told you the government shut down twice in the last year. Now I want to show you what those two shutdowns were actually about, because this is where most people get it wrong, and it is the key to understanding everything that comes next. The two shutdowns were not about the same thing. They were about two completely different fights. And the fact that the same weapon got used for both is the whole point.
***
Start with the first one, the forty three day record breaker last fall. That shutdown was about your health insurance. Specifically, it was about the enhanced Obamacare subsidies, the extra government money that had been lowering monthly premiums for millions of people who buy their coverage on the Affordable Care Act marketplace. Those enhanced subsidies were set to expire at the end of the year. Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, refused to vote for any bill to keep the government open unless those subsidies got extended. Republicans would not do a clean extension. And so the two sides locked up, and the government went dark for forty three days over health insurance tax credits.
***
Here is how that one ended, and you need to hear it because it comes back around. After forty three days, eight Democrats broke away from their own party and voted to reopen the government. What did they get in exchange? A promise. Senate Majority Leader John Thune promised to hold a Senate vote in December on extending the subsidies. That is it. A promise of a vote. Not a guarantee the subsidies would pass. Just a vote.
***
And that vote happened, and it failed. Both parties put up their own version, and both versions went down. Part of the reason it stuck is that Republicans did not want a clean extension. Their leader in the Senate called a straight three year extension a waste of tens of billions of dollars, and wanted reforms attached, things like an income cap and anti fraud measures. Democrats wanted the clean extension with no strings. Neither side would move, so the enhanced subsidies expired on December thirty first, right on schedule, and they have not been restored.
***
Here is what that did to real people, in real numbers. On the federal marketplace, the average premium went up about thirty percent. When you look at what people actually pay out of their own pocket after subsidies, the average monthly payment jumped from around one hundred thirteen dollars to around one hundred seventy eight dollars, close to a sixty percent increase. And it hit some families far harder than that. There is a line called the subsidy cliff, and once your household income crosses four hundred percent of the poverty level by even a single dollar, you lose the help entirely. More than twenty four million Americans get their coverage through this system. So Democrats forced the longest shutdown in history to stop those subsidies from expiring, and the subsidies expired anyway, and everyday people got the bill.
***
And here is the honest wrinkle, because I am not going to pretend this is a clean party line fight. It is not. When the House came back, a handful of Republicans, the ones in swing districts, actually broke from their own leadership and signed on to force a vote to bring the subsidies back. Some Republican senators said out loud they were worried about their own constituents facing double and triple premiums. So this is not a case of one party good and one party evil. It is a case of a real problem that neither side has solved, and that both sides have been perfectly willing to use as a hostage. That health care fight is still open. Still unresolved. Still burning. Hold onto that, because it is the most likely thing to get loaded into the September fight.
***
Now the second shutdown, the seventy six day one over the winter. That one was not about health care at all. That one was about immigration. Federal immigration agents had killed two American citizens. One of them was a man named Alex Pretti, shot by Customs and Border Protection agents. There was a second deadly shooting of a United States citizen by federal immigration officers in Minnesota. And when that happened, Senate Democrats pulled their support for funding the Department of Homeland Security. They said they would not vote to fund the agencies responsible unless there were new restrictions placed on how immigration enforcement operates. Republicans refused to handcuff the agents doing the arrests and the deportations. And the department that runs the border went dark for seventy six days.
***
So look at what you actually have here. Two shutdowns in one year. One over health insurance, one over immigration. Two totally different fights, and the exact same tool used to wage both of them. That is not a coincidence. That is the pattern. The shutdown has stopped being a rare emergency and become a reusable weapon, and Washington now reaches for it whenever one side decides a fight is worth holding the whole country hostage over.
***
Now, I want to be fair about what the Democrats say, because you cannot beat an argument honestly if you will not state it plainly. On health care, their case is that letting the subsidies die means real families pay hundreds more a month, and that is worth fighting for. On immigration, their case is that federal officers killed American citizens, and they will not sign a blank check to the agencies that did it without some accountability. Say both of those out loud, because that is the strongest version of what they believe.
***
And here is the answer to both. On health care, Democrats set that expiration date themselves when they wrote the law, and then shut down the government to escape their own deadline, and still lost. On immigration, two deaths, as serious as they are, were being used as the doorway to something much larger, a permanent rollback of enforcement across the board. The demand was never narrow. It was not investigate these two cases. It was restrict the agents, restrict the agency, choke the funding. You do not shut down the border for seventy six days over two investigations. You do it when the real goal is to break the enforcement machine itself. In both fights, the stated reason and the real goal were not the same thing.
***
Now here is a piece almost nobody flagged, and it matters for what happens next. Remember that full year funding bill that finally passed in June, the Secure America Act? It did one specific thing that changed the board. It locked in three years of funding for Customs and Border Protection and for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Three years. In plain terms, it took the two agencies at the center of every immigration fight and guaranteed their money, so they cannot be starved by a shutdown again. You cannot threaten to defund an agency whose budget is already set for three years. So the single most powerful weapon Democrats had on immigration, the threat to choke enforcement funding, got taken out of their hands. That is a big deal, and it barely made the news when it happened.
***
So think about what that means for September. The immigration fuse is mostly defused, because those agencies are funded for three years. The health care fuse is different. Those subsidies already expired, so the fight now is not about stopping expiration, it is about whether to bring them back. And that is exactly the kind of grievance that could get loaded into the September deadline as leverage. Which brings me to the question I keep coming back to, and it is the honest one. Would the Democrats really do this again, right before an election? Because on its face it looks like political suicide. So let me argue both sides of it, because you deserve the real answer, not a cheerleader.
***
Here is the case that they will not do it. Look at the history. In nineteen ninety five and ninety six, the Republican Congress under Newt Gingrich shut the government down for twenty two days fighting Bill Clinton over the budget. Clinton won that fight in the eyes of the public, and Republicans wore the blame. In two thousand thirteen, Republicans forced a sixteen day shutdown trying to kill Obamacare. They got the blame and got nothing for it. And in two thousand eighteen into two thousand nineteen, it was our side. Donald Trump forced a thirty five day shutdown, the longest in history at that point, over money for the border wall. Eight hundred thousand workers went unpaid, it cost the economy eleven billion dollars, and in the end Trump reopened the government without getting the wall money he shut it down for. So the pattern is brutal and it is bipartisan. The party that forces the shutdown usually loses the public, and often does not even get the thing it wanted. That is the strongest reason to believe Democrats walk away from this fight in September.
***
Now here is the case that they might do it anyway, and this one is stronger than it looks. First, they already did it. Twice. This year. They ate a forty three day shutdown over health care and a seventy six day shutdown over immigration, back to back, and did not blink. So anyone who tells you they would never risk a shutdown before an election is arguing against something that already happened, in the last twelve months, on this exact Congress. The evidence is on the table.
***
Second, the blame does not split the way it used to. A modern shutdown is a messaging war, and both sides now believe they can win the spin. Democrats will not go on television and say we shut down the government. They will say we refused to let your health insurance premiums double, or we refused to fund agents who killed American citizens. And if their base rewards that fight more than swing voters punish the chaos, the incentive flips. Midterm elections are won on turnout, on getting your own angry people to show up, not on convincing the guy in the middle. A shutdown that fires up your base can look like a smart bet even when it looks reckless to everyone else.
***
Third, and this is the one people forget, leadership may not fully control it. Even if the top Democrats want to avoid a shutdown, the loudest activist wing of the party can force their hand. We have watched the exact same thing happen to Republican leadership, where the hardliners drag their own leaders into a shutdown nobody at the top actually wanted. Sometimes a shutdown is not a strategy. It is a failure of leadership to hold its own people in line.
***
So put it all together. The clean bill needs sixty votes in the Senate. If Senate Democrats block it, they own the shutdown, straight up, and no spin fully washes that off. And the question in front of them is simple to say and hard to answer. Do you swallow a clean bill that keeps the government open at current levels and moves the fight to December, or do you block it, force a fight now, probably over health care, and gamble that your base rewards you more than the middle punishes you. That is the decision. Eleven days, sixty votes, and an election weeks away.
***
You want to know where I land. Here is my honest read. The most likely outcome is a short term patch. Both sides find a way to keep the lights on and shove the real fight to December, after the votes are counted, because neither party actually wants to explain a closed government to voters in October. That is the smart money, and in Washington the smart money usually wins. But I am not betting the house on it, and here is why. This is the one place where the smart money and the base do not agree, and we have already watched this base win this exact argument twice in a single year. So my read is a patch, with a real and rising chance of a stumble, and the closer we get to that eleven day window with nothing passed, the higher that chance climbs. If you want the one thing to watch, watch the Senate vote count. The day a clean funding bill hits the Senate floor and cannot find sixty, that is the day a shutdown stops being a threat and starts being a schedule.
***
So far I have told you when the government runs out of money, and I have shown you the two different fights that shut it down in the last year. Now I want to show you the thing hiding in plain sight, the part that should make you angrier than either of the first two segments. Because the real scandal is not any single shutdown. The real scandal is that Washington has decided the shutdown itself is a tool worth keeping.
***
Here is a fact that stopped me cold. This July, the House committee in charge of government spending held a hearing on how to reform the shutdown process, how to stop this from happening over and over. It was the first hearing that committee has held on that subject since two thousand and eight. Seventeen years. Think about what happened in those seventeen years. The sixteen day shutdown over Obamacare. The thirty five day shutdown over the border wall. The forty three day record breaker last fall. The seventy six day mess this past winter. Every one of those was a flashing red warning light. Every one cost money and hurt families. And the committee whose entire job is government spending could not be bothered to hold a single hearing on how to end the cycle until this month. That is not an accident. You do not accidentally ignore a problem for seventeen straight years. You ignore it because fixing it was never really the goal.
***
And it is not because there are no solutions. The solutions exist. They are written down. They have bill numbers. One of them comes from Congresswoman Nancy Mace, and it is about as simple as it sounds. Her bill says that if Congress misses its funding deadline, an automatic continuing resolution kicks in. The government keeps running at ninety four percent of the previous year’s funding level. Nobody gets shut down. No worker gets sent home without a paycheck. No airport backs up. No family stands in a food bank line. The threat of a shutdown just disappears, because missing the deadline no longer closes anything. It only trims spending a little, which, if anything, gives Congress a reason to actually finish its work on time instead of dragging it to the edge.
***
There are other versions of the same idea floating around. Automatic stopgaps. Faster procedures. None of them are new. None of them are radical. So ask yourself the obvious question. If the fix is this simple, and everybody claims to hate shutdowns, and shutdowns cost the country billions, why has it never passed?
***
Here is the answer, and it is the whole point of this episode. The shutdown is not a bug in the system. It is a feature. It is leverage. A shutdown is the one moment when a group that does not have the votes to win the normal way can force the majority to the table by threatening to shut everything down. That is exactly how Democrats used it on health care last fall, and on immigration this winter. Take away the shutdown, and you take away that leverage. And nobody in power wants to give up leverage, because everybody in Washington knows that someday they will be in the minority again, and when that day comes, they will want the weapon back in their own hands.
***
That is why a bill that would protect you, the taxpayer, the federal worker, the traveler, the family that depends on a government service, sits on a shelf year after year. Not because it does not work. Because it works too well. It disarms both sides. And both sides would rather keep the weapon than protect you from it.
***
And do not think for a second any of this is free. Look at the numbers from the last really long one. The thirty five day shutdown in twenty eighteen and nineteen cost the American economy eleven billion dollars, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Three billion of that is gone forever, money the economy never got back. Eleven billion dollars set on fire so two sides could stare at each other for a month. And that was one shutdown. We have now had two more in a single year, one of them longer than that one.
***
It gets worse when you follow the payroll. Since two thousand nineteen, the law guarantees that federal workers get their back pay once a shutdown ends. Both the ones sent home and the ones forced to work without a paycheck. Now follow that through. During a shutdown, hundreds of thousands of workers get sent home and told not to work. Then when it is over, the taxpayer pays them anyway, in full, for every day they were not allowed to lift a finger. You pay full price for a government that was closed. You pay salaries for work that legally could not be done. That is not a side effect. That is the arrangement Washington has built, and they built it on your dime.
***
So the fix that would stop all of this, the automatic funding bill, is not hard to understand and it is not expensive. It would save billions and spare hundreds of thousands of families the fear of missing a paycheck over a fight they have nothing to do with. And it goes nowhere, year after year. Ask yourself who benefits from that. Not the worker. Not the taxpayer. Not you. The only people who benefit from keeping the shutdown alive are the people who get to point it like a gun.
***
And there is a cost here bigger than the billions of dollars, and I want to name it before we close. Every time Washington shuts the government down, it teaches the country to expect it. It makes chaos feel normal. A generation ago, a government shutdown was a genuine crisis that made the front page for weeks. Now it is a season. It comes around like a holiday, and people just brace for it and move on. That is what real damage looks like. Not one closed office. A whole country trained to accept that the most powerful government on earth cannot reliably keep its own lights on, and to shrug about it. When you stop being shocked by something that should shock you, the people in power have already won. They have lowered your expectations to the floor. And a public with low expectations is a public that is easy to govern badly.
***
So let me tie the three pieces together, because they are one story. There is the clock, the deadline that runs out on September thirtieth while Congress takes a five week vacation. There is the pattern, two shutdowns in one year, one over your health insurance and one over the border, the same weapon aimed at two different fights. And there is the weapon itself, a tool Washington could disarm tomorrow with a simple bill and refuses to, because both parties would rather keep it loaded than give up the leverage.
***
The clock, the two fights, the weapon. Put them side by side and you do not see dysfunction. You see a system working exactly the way the people inside it want it to work, at your expense, on purpose. The deadline is a feature, because a deadline is a threat. The hot issue, health care or immigration, take your pick, is a feature, because a hot issue keeps the base loud and the money flowing. And the shutdown weapon stays right where it is, loaded and leaning against the wall, because the day either party gives it up is the day they lose the ability to hold the whole country hostage when they do not get their way. None of this is broken. That is the hard part to swallow. It is all running exactly as designed. And you are the one who pays for the design, in dollars when the bill comes due, and in something worse than dollars every time you learn to expect it.
***
AND THAT’S IT.
***
That is everyone knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
***
I am Brian Bullock of starborn studios. Find me on X at Everyoneknws1. If this hits you share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe. leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com
***
Because everyone knows. Your silence is your consent