Month: November 2025

The longest government shutdown in history is finally over, but not before exacting billions of dollars in economic losses and imposing severe hardships on millions of Americans. It provided further evidence, if any was needed, of how dysfunctional our federal government and national politics have become.

And for what?  As is typical of shutdowns, it was an exercise in political theater that produced virtually nothing of value. Democrats abandoned their asserted steadfast demand for an extension of emergency Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies. They settled for a promised Senate vote on the extension, something they probably could have secured just by threatening a shutdown.

While Democrats got additional legislative language affirming federal employee rights during a shutdown, those rights were already protected. (See below) The only significant positive outcome was rejection of the House’s ludicrous effort to undermine the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’s own “watchdog” agency. But even that achievement will be fleeting if Congress lets President Trump appoint a partisan loyalist as the next Comptroller General.

The lack of substantive outcomes is unsurprising since the shutdown was never about substance. Rather, it was a cynical political game between our two warring parties, each all too willing to inflict heavy damage on the American public in pursuit of partisan gain.

When a shutdown was threatened earlier this year, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sensibly headed it off by supporting a stopgap funding measure. In response, Democrats to his left mercilessly excoriated him. This time around, Schumer yielded to the intense pressure to do something—anything—to show that Democrats still had a pulse. A shutdown was the only option available.

The ostensible goal of the shutdown—extending ACA subsidies–was chosen for its political appeal rather than its substantive merit and was never realistically achievable. The subsidies were enacted as a temporary emergency measure during COVID. Simply extending them without addressing much needed health care reforms is poor policy and certainly not a compelling justification for shuting down the government. But it polls well. The real impetus for the shutdown was extreme (and understandable) Democratic frustration over their powerlessness and irrelevance in the face of Trump’s many outrages.^[1]They could have been more transparent, and possibly more effective, by building their goals around this. For example: clarify that injured parties may sue to stop illegal impoundments and that … Continue reading The shutdown offered an outlet for this, and it did put Democrats back in the spotlight for a while.

The political nature of the shutdown is illustrated by the fact that none of the eight Democratic senators who voted to end it is up for reelection in 2026. The split between the two ideologically comparable Virginia senators is noteworthy in this regard. Tim Kaine, who has five years remaining on his term, voted to end the shutdown; Mark Warner, whose term expires in 2026, voted to prolong it. 

Shutdown tactics were just as politically driven and cynical on the Republican side. The Trump administration initially embraced the shutdown as an opportunity to further abuse federal employees and gut “Democrat programs.” It threatened to deny furloughed employees back pay to which they clearly were entitled. It tried to fire employees through reductions in force (RIFs) until a court declared the RIFs illegal and enjoined them. It engaged in wholesale and likely illegal manipulation of what funding sources remained during the shutdown to continue payments for favored purposes while denying others.

As usual, GOP congressional leaders fell in line as Trump flouted the law and trashed congressional spending prerogatives left and right.  Speaker Mike Johnson, who seems to view his primarily role as being a Trump operative, kept the House in recess during the entire shutdown and shamefully refused to swear in a newly elected Democratic member. He apparently did this in part to avoid a House vote to release additional Epstein files that could embarrass Trump. (Senate GOP leaders at least rejected Trump’s demand to abolish the filibuster.)

Still further demonstrating that the shutdown was all about politics, postmortems across the ideological spectrum focus almost exclusively on which party “won” or “lost” politically. While this can be (and no doubt will be) debated ad nauseum, the more important but overlooked point is that the American people are the surest losers. The costs and burdens of the shutdown fell on them, and they gained nothing from the political gamesmanship.

This is the standard, predictable outcome of government shutdowns. They invariably turn out to be political side shows and fool’s errands that fail to achieve their stated goals and produce only public harm.  As former Comptroller General Dave Walker succinctly puts it: “Shutdowns are stupid!” The public would greatly benefit if both parties abstained from them. Alas, there’s little chance of that in the current political environment.

Both our increasingly extreme and polarized parties, along with their cheerleaders, are thoroughly addicted to political posturing and consumed by their mindset of Team Red versus Team Blue. They focus almost exclusively on coming out of a shutdown with a political “win” while showing little regard for the damage they inflict on the country and its citizens in the process. It’s no wonder that both parties are so estranged from the public and held in such low esteem. The irony is that if either of them—or a new party–moved closer to the moderate and heterodox views most Americans espouse and their strong preference for pragmatic, bipartisan problem solvers, it could achieve great success.

Fortunately, this shutdown was eventually broken by eight senators who were less vulnerable to immediate political retribution and thus freer to make an impartial choice. (Evidently, some of their more fearful colleagues privately supported them.) Hopefully, they can help avoid a repeat of this fiasco when the stopgap measure expires at the end of January.