A History of American Government Shutdowns

We go back to the 1980s, and before, to see the root causes of shutdowns and look at 1996, 2013 and 2018 versions.  

Transcript

A History of American Government Shutdowns

November 2025

History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.

Thomas Jefferson

Once, Confucius was walking in the mountains, and he came across a woman weeping by a grave. He asked the woman what her sorrow was, and she replied, We are a family of hunters. My father was eaten by a tiger. My husband was bitten by a tiger and died. And now my only son! Why don’t you move down and live in the valley? Why do you continue to live up here? Asked Confucius. And the woman replied, But sir, there are no tax collectors here! Confucius added to his disciples, You see, a bad government is more to be feared than tigers.

Lin Yutang

“Shutting down the entire government over something never did make sense to the American people, still doesn’t, and won’t in the future.”

Former Sen. Richard Burr 

First, let’s be clear on our language.  What is a shutdown? When legislative and executive authorities disagree on appropriations bills or continuing resolutions necessary to fund federal operations, it can lead to a stalemate. Without legal authorization to spend money, many government functions cease, federal employees go unpaid, and ripple effects spread throughout the economy, public services, and the nation’s global perception of its political stability. Although shutdowns are most widely discussed in the context of the U.S. federal government, the phenomenon raises broader questions about budgeting, separation of powers, partisan polarization, and the fragility of democratic governance.

Now, let’s be clearer on the definition.  It is a partial government shutdown.  Social Security checks get paid.  Our militaries stay on the job.  Most essential functions, such as those of TSA agents, stay on the job.  In fact, the vast majority of what our government pays for —entitlements and defense—continues.  Other areas of governmental oversight, such as national parks, museums, the Education Department’s Head Start, and SNAP, do not receive funding.  SNAP stands for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.  There is also a timing element involved.  I noted that TSA agents still stay on the job and are paid, eventually.  The issue is that the people responsible for sending out the checks, the administrative aspect of this case, and the Transportation Department are not on the job.  

So, if a TSA agent has $100,000 in savings, they can access it, but what about someone living paycheck to paycheck? Or that the savings come with a penalty if withdrawn?  It is why a two-week shutdown can be managed with some ease.  However, a 30-day one?  That becomes an issue.  And the TSA agent is just one of many federal workers caught up in this political practice.  

I like to think of shutdowns as similar to private entity strikes, though with one critical difference.  After the disagreement, like most things in life, is about money. Auto workers, teachers and baseball players vs, the C Suite, the taxpayers and team owners respectively.  Just as labor wants more pay and management wants to give less, so roughly the Dems want to garner more money and the GOP less.  

The crucial difference is if GM goes on strike and you cannot get a Silverado, then you go to the Ford dealership and get an F150.  The baseball strike several decades ago helped put the decline of the sport on greased rails.  It was already losing interest to football, but no product meant fans went elsewhere. Yet there is no other entity that pays SNAP food benefits and no other security line at the airport.  It is the TSA or stay at home.  

The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, meaning that no money may be drawn from the Treasury except by legislative approval.  The entire point of this decision was to curb power from an overmighty executive by giving Congress the “purse” along with the “sword” – the power to declare war.  Of course, we have fought several large and dozens of small wars in the past 80 years, but Congress has not done so since 1942.  Even granting extra-legal powers, not passed since 2003, shows just one channeling of legislative power to the executive, but I digress.  

For most of American history, funding gaps did not automatically trigger shutdowns. Part of this was due to the nature of government in the Early Republic.  Presidents and Congress did not take week-long breaks in August to return to their states to campaign.  They took several months off, including avoiding the horrid summers of mosquito-infested Washington City (so-called at the time).  The government did not continue.  Customs officials, responsible for the nation’s most significant funding mechanism in the form of tariffs, still collected this form of tax.  And the military, tiny as it was, still maintained vigilance at bases and ports.  

But there was not that much more to do.  That changed as the scope and government increased, especially during and after the American Civil War, and in the 1890s as “billion” dollar Congresses met.  

However, it was the obligations imposed on the government in the form of progressive policies, especially under Wilson, and later Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, that created the friction over funding that is the root cause of government shutdowns.  And it was not just a coincidence that the first government shutdown began with the first true conservative, Ronald Reagan, since Calvin Coolidge, some 60 years before.  Between the time of Coolidge and Reagan, the government created Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  It began to build housing and created departments ranging from HUD to the EPA to the Department of Education.  The scope of the government had expanded exponentially, and Reagan was the first president in six decades to yell “stop.”  

The first partial shutdown came under President Gerald Ford in 1976 when he vetoed a spending bill amid a dispute over the budget for the Department of Health, Education & Welfare. 

But the finger-pointing then — and the rhetoric — can feel quite familiar to today. In 1984, President Reagan laid the blame on what he saw as intransigent House Democrats. “This has been typical of what has been happening since we’ve been here,” he said, “and you can lay this on the majority party in the House of Representatives.”

Before 1980, government agencies interpreted funding lapses as procedural issues rather than legal barriers to continued operation. That changed with a series of opinions by Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti during the Carter administration, which clarified that federal agencies could not legally continue normal operations without appropriations. These opinions led to the modern concept of a government shutdown: a legally enforced suspension of federal activities until Congress authorizes spending.

Civiletti called for a stricter interpretation of the Anti-Deficiency Act, a longstanding law that prohibits government agencies from authorizing expenditures in excess of the amounts authorized by Congress. Ultimately, the Attorney General believed government agencies had no legal means to operate during a funding gap. Beginning with the appropriations process for fiscal year 1982, numerous subsequent funding gaps have led to shutdowns of affected agencies, resulting in the halt of day-to-day operations and the furloughing of employees without pay. Eventually, as noted above, federal officials carved out exemptions for government employees deemed “essential,” such as military and law enforcement personnel involved in protecting life and property.

The first full, not partial, shutdown took place on November 23, 1981, lasting for one day and placing 241,000 federal employees on furlough. This occurred after Reagan vetoed a proposed appropriation bill that contained a reduced set of spending cuts compared to the ones he had proposed for select government departments.

Shutdowns became more frequent beginning in the 1980s, but they were generally brief and had limited effects.  Even the Reagan shutdown was a blip, especially given that Congress was still firmly in the hands of the Democrats.  

The next crisis arose after the 1994 election.  The election took place during Democratic President Bill Clinton’s first term in office and featured members of the 104th United States Congress, often referred to as the “Republican Revolution.” It was the first time Republicans had unified control of Congress since 1953. And instead of House Speakers who would support the status quo, such as Joseph R. Martin Jr., who served as Speaker in 1953, the only GOPer to hold the gavel from 1931 through 1995, the Republican Speaker was firebrand Newt Gingrich.  

Writing for NPR, Don Gonyas notes, “The language (of the shutdown) was bureaucratic, but it represented a huge change in how such negotiations were conducted. The dispute wasn’t simply a matter of haggling over a specific department budget or a single line item; it was about ideology, getting to the very core of how big the federal government should be and how it should operate.”

The budget standoffs between President Bill Clinton and Gingrich, supported in the Senate by Majority Leader Bob Dole, produced shutdowns lasting a total of 27 days. The first was in 1995-1996, lasting 26 days. The Republicans wanted to balance the budget, cut social programs, and repeal Clinton’s 1993 tax increases. The government first shut down for five days in November 1995 and then again for 21 days from December 1995 to January 1996, with the longer shutdown ending after Republicans accepted Clinton’s budget proposal and compromise. 

Despite the shutdowns beginning in Reagan’s time, these were the first and, at the time, longest government shutdowns in U.S. history.  It was not just that Congress was unified under the GOP, but the nature of the leaders had changed, especially after Reagan.  

Gingrich was accused of everything from general obstinacy and pettiness. According to the Washington Post, Gingrich said that the fact that the president didn’t speak to him during a trip on Air Force One, and that he was seated at the back of the plane, was “part of why you ended up with us sending down a tougher’ interim spending bill. “It’s petty…But I think it’s human.” These days, even the former Speaker thinks the Republicans came out ahead after 1995. “While the shutdown produced some short-term pain, it set the stage for a budget deal in 1996 that led to the largest drop in federal discretionary spending since 1969,” he wrote in a February 2011 Washington Post opinion piece.

In 2010, with a 60-vote Senate and a large majority in the House, Barack Obama passed the still-controversial Affordable Care Act without a single GOP vote.  To reach 60, he had to cut special deals with the Senators from Nebraska and Louisiana, now known as the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase, respectively.

On the House side, Speaker Nancy Pelosi not only disallowed debate on the bill in committee but also did not allow her own caucus to review the bill.  As she famously stated, they will have to pass it to see what’s in it.”  And we are talking about the most consequential piece of legislation since the 1960s.  Then, to add fuel to the fire, the bill was passed, supposedly, as Ilya Shapiro, writing for the Cato Institute, said at the time, “Chief Justice John Roberts changed the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate into a tax and thus rescued President Obama’s signature legislation.” The original bill contained a provision that required individuals to buy into the ACA under the Commerce Clause, which is illegal, as there is nothing in the clause that forces one to do so.  However, Roberts, swayed by public opinion and not wishing to overturn a bill passed by Congress and supported by the president, literally changed the wording of the bill to state that the individual mandate was a tax, which Congress can impose, as noted above.  All along, Obama had said the ACA was not a tax, yet here it was.  

I go into this ACA program to illustrate how much the GOP and its supporters wished to gut the bill.  Unfortunately, they went about it in the wrong way.  

The Republican-controlled House passed two spending bills with amendments aimed at crippling the law: one that would have repealed the medical device tax, and another that would have delayed the implementation of the ACA by a year. So far, so good.  However, the Senate, which Democrats controlled, rejected both measures. Senate Democrats and Obama insisted on passing a “clean” spending bill without any divisive policy riders. Their position forced House Republicans — and their allies in the Senate, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas — to choose between funding the government and shutting it down over their opposition to the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. They decided on a shutdown.

The shutdown went into effect on October 1, 2013, the first day of the new fiscal year. It lasted for 16 days, until Congress passed a spending bill that ended the shutdown.  During the same period, the ACA exchanges were launched and immediately faced issues due to poor implementation.  This calamity might have led to a groundswell of activity to assist the GOP, but the shutdown allowed the press and the public to focus on Cruz’s grandstanding rather than the horrific rollout (note that the rollout occurred years after the bill’s passage, after the election, which was intentional).  Because the GOP lost the PR battle over the shutdown, they capitulated; eventually, months later, the administration addressed the enrollment issues.  Sen Cruz is “nuts”, wrote the late and immensely great Charles Krauthammer. “Every fiscal showdown has redounded against the Republicans… How many times must we learn this lesson?”

Grover Norquist, the influential anti-tax activist, likened Cruz’s strategy to a plotline in the satirical animated show “South Park,” in which a group of gnomes comes up with a brilliant plan to become rich. “Step 1 is: Steal all the underwear in South Park. Step 2 is: Mumumumbumbumbum,” Nor­quist said, making a nonsense sound. “And Step 3 is: Make a million dollars. And this [plan] reminded me of that episode.”

As David A. Fahrenthold and Katie Zezima, writing for the Texas Tribune, noted, Cruz’s gambit didn’t work. Neither Senate Democrats nor Obama gave an inch on their cherished law. Instead, the government shut down for 16 days, and Republicans in Congress were blamed for it — including by other Republicans, who said they had distracted attention from the disastrous rollout of the HealthCare.gov website.

Shutdown of 2018

Under the Trump administration, from December 22, 2018, until January 25, 2019, the United States federal government entered a shutdown. Lasting 35 days, this was the most extended shutdown in U.S. history, and the second and final federal government shutdown involving furloughs during the first presidency of Donald Trump. It occurred when the 115th Congress and Trump could not agree on an appropriations bill to fund the federal government’s operations for the 2019 fiscal year, or a temporary continuing resolution that could extend the deadline for passing a bill. Due to the Anti-Deficiency Act, nine executive departments, which employ around 800,000 people, had to partially or fully shut down, affecting approximately a quarter of government activities and resulting in employees being furloughed or required to work without pay. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the shutdown cost the American economy at least $11 billion USD, excluding indirect costs that were difficult to quantify.

One of the key bones of contention was Trump’s request for nearly $6 billion for border wall build, something the Dems clearly said no to, “I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck, because the people of this country want border security.” This was said during a heated Oval Office meeting with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer on December 11, 2018. “I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it.” This statement, made in the same meeting, was in direct response to Democratic leaders calling it the “Trump shutdown”.

Previously, it had been the GOP that had taken it on the chin, at least temporarily, in polling on shutdowns.  As the (former) party of big government, the loss of governmental services would more adversely affect Democratic constituencies.  And because most of these fights were aimed at curbing spending or the incursions of government into areas such as healthcare, there was always greater passion on the funding side than on the side of cutting back government.  The 2013 survey also found Democrats with an 8-point advantage on the congressional ballot, with 47% saying they would prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress and 39% saying they preferred a GOP-controlled Congress. 

Yet, despite the GOP losing in the short term, government shutdowns tend to fade by election time, simply because they do not last that long.  In 1996, the GOP held its majorities in Congress despite Bill Clinton easily winning a 2nd term.  And in 2014, the GOP romped its way to a 55-seat Senate, the most since before the New Deal, and a large House majority.  Other issues had taken the public’s interest.

According to Bridget Bowman of NBC News, “The most recent government shutdown occurred during Trump’s first term. It began in December 2018 and ended in January 2019, spanning 35 days and becoming the longest in U.S. history. 

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted in January 2019, before a funding deal was announced, found that 50% of Americans blamed Trump for the shutdown, while 37% attributed the responsibility to Democrats in Congress. But Trump’s 43% approval rating in that same survey was unchanged from a poll prior to the shutdown.  

An overwhelming share of Americans — 71% — said at the time that neither they nor someone in their family had been affected by the shutdown, while 28% said they had been affected. 

At that time, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found a majority of Americans (53%) blamed Republicans for the stalemate, while 31% blamed Obama. And, unlike in 2019, the GOP’s popularity hit a low point, with just 24% saying they viewed the party favorably.  However, the 2020 election was not primarily about the shutdown, as the issue of the day was COVID-19 and Trump’s response to it.  And both before and after the shutdown, Trump’s approvals were underwater, a hallmark of his presidency both then and now.  

As of this writing, the new 2025 shutdown has just set the record for the longest.  Yeah, team.  

We know shutdowns carry financial, administrative, and political consequences. Everything, from economic impact to reduced Public Services and National Security, to a further erosion of Public Trust, shutdowns reinforce perceptions of governmental incompetence and partisan chaos. Each shutdown becomes a symbolic reminder that elected officials are willing to allow governance itself to be disrupted for political gain. This corrodes democratic legitimacy and fuels public cynicism.

And that does not even get us to a program like SNAP.  I think it might come as a surprise that 43 million Americans are on SNAP.  Given the incentives on the part of both politicians and big food companies and retailers, I have many doubts about this program. When a giant like Walmart sees 12% of their TOTAL revenue coming from this program, another company on the government teat, the desire to keep the gravy flowing is strong.  I also wonder how we have “hunger” in a nation in which the CDC says that 42% of Americans are overweight, with the majority of that in low-income brackets.  

Yet it is unfair, even to me, that you promise someone something and yank it at the last minute. I would like to see SNAP reduced, but there should be a six-month to one-year period so that families on SNAP can prepare.  

Shutdowns expose inherent tensions within the American constitutional system. They highlight the difficulty of striking a balance between checks and balances, as well as the need for effective governance. Some scholars argue that shutdowns reflect the Framers’ design: forcing branches of government to negotiate rather than rule unilaterally. Others counter that shutdowns represent a breakdown, not a fulfillment, of constitutional intent, since the Founders did not envision partisan gridlock as a normal condition of government.

My political views on government are becoming the hammer where everything looks like a nail.  I mean that when I see governmental dysfunction, it is almost always a result of congressional issues.

Overmighty presidents? Congress.  The Supreme Court makes the laws and is polarized. Congress.  Massive debt and deficits? Congress.  Shutdowns?  Congress.  

Reform Proposals have included automatic continuing resolutions, where funding would continue at existing levels if Congress fails to act, thereby removing shutdowns as a legislative bargaining chip. However, this would require continuous spending increases in an era of massive debt and deficits.  

Penalties for Lawmakers?  Proposals include withholding congressional salaries during shutdowns or preventing recesses until funding is passed. I am liking this one.  Let’s add to it a few simple premises. They cannot leave Washington, D.C., and none can do TV interviews.  

There is Biennial Budgeting: Transitioning to two-year budget cycles may alleviate deadline pressure. Maybe.  

Another take?  Linking Shutdowns to Elections (Parliamentary-Style). If a budget fails, Congress would be dissolved and elections triggered—an incentive to avoid deadlock.  I would add removing TVs and Congressional term limits, but again, anything to fix Congress is my all-purpose solution for fixing the entire government.