On October 1, the United States federal government shut down when Congress couldn’t agree on a budget. The main sticking point? Funding for Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies. What followed this disagreement was the longest shutdown in American history. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the shutdown lasted 43 days, left roughly 670,000 federal employees furloughed, forced around 730,000 more essential workers to work without pay, and disrupted critical services across the country.
Flights were canceled due to a shortage of air traffic controllers. Food stamp benefits were suspended or only partially fulfilled for millions of families that relied on them. Museums shuttered their doors.
Once President Donald Trump signed funding legislation on November 13, the government reopened, but excluded the ACA subsidies that Democrats had been fervently demanding. Subsequent December negotiations failed and the subsidies expired on December 31, 2025. The shutdown relief bill funds federal operations through January, but if no permanent resolution is reached, the government could be shut down again.
How did we get to a shutdown?
To understand how the government reached the shutdown, it’s essential to understand how federal funding works. Every year, Congress needs to pass a budget to keep the government running. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate must agree on this budget, then send it to the President to sign. Without this agreement, the government cannot legally spend money and must shut down.
The House of Representatives passed a funding bill on September 19 to prevent the looming shutdown. However, the bill stalled in the Senate, where Democrats refused to support it without guaranteed extensions of expiring health insurance tax credits, which would affect approximately 24 million Americans, per the BBC.
However, the Senate’s rules require 60 votes just to end debate on a bill — a process called “cloture” — before senators can hold a final vote on whether to pass it. Republicans only have 53 seats, so they needed at least 7 Democrats to join them. This gave Democrats key leverage to demand an ACA subsidy extension as a condition for their votes.
When negotiations broke down on September 30, the federal government subsequently shut down for the first time in nearly seven years. Democrats drew a defensive line around the lack of ACA subsidy legislation, a core program enacted in 2010 under the Democratic leadership of Barack Obama. The result was a prolonged standoff in which neither side would budge, despite mounting economic costs.
U.S. History Teacher Dr. Will Peters observed that shutdowns feed “further into political polarization,” and noted that while “government-level disagreement is healthy in democracy,” the current approach “only deepens divides.”
The impasse revealed significant fractures within the Democratic Party itself. Some lawmakers insisted on continuing to leverage their voting power to secure ACA subsidies, while others prioritized reopening the government and ending disruptions. This internal division complicated negotiations and played a significant role in prolonging the shutdown.
What stopped working, and what kept going?
During a shutdown, federal law divides government workers into two groups: ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’ employees. Essential employees — including law enforcement, air traffic controllers, and Border Patrol officers — must continue working without pay. Employees of agencies that aren’t critical to keep the government running are deemed non-essential. They are furloughed, meaning they are placed on a temporary, unpaid suspension. Once the government reopens, they are entitled to be paid back in full, in accordance with the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019.
Millions of federal employees either worked without pay or were sent home, depending on whether their jobs were classified as essential or not. However, according to the National League of Cities, members of Congress continued to receive a salary of approximately $15,000 per month during the shutdown.
Social Security checks continued, mail was delivered, and federal law enforcement remained largely operational. Still, 72% of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) workforce was required to work without pay. The shutdown demonstrated how the government can function just enough to avoid complete collapse while still inflicting widespread harm.
Transportation Security Authority (TSA) agents and air traffic controllers, who were working without paychecks, began calling in sick. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated flight reductions, cancelling up to 6% of flights at 40 of the biggest US airports. As reported by Fox News, FlightAware data showed that through the final week of the shutdown, more than 26,000 flights were delayed, and 7,500 were canceled. The disruption came just weeks before Thanksgiving and the start of the holiday season, exacerbating the impact during one of the busiest periods of the year for air travel.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food aid to roughly 41.7 million Americans, including 16 million children, issued only partial payments to many recipients. SNAP and other food assistance programs faced unprecedented administrative challenges, leaving millions of families uncertain about nutritional benefits.
Even mandatory programs like Medicaid and Medicare experienced severe administrative slowdowns. Federal staff responsible for processing approvals and renewals were furloughed, forcing states to front funds to keep services running. In the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), 41% of the health agency’s workers were furloughed.
Many national parks were partly closed to the public, some visitor centers and park museums shut down, and approximately 9,000 park rangers were furloughed.
Goldman Sachs estimates that each week of a shutdown costs the economy between 0.1 and 0.2 percentage points of growth—real money that affects jobs and businesses nationwide. As stated by CNBC, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the 2018-2019 shutdown cost the economy nearly $11 billion. The most recent shutdown likely exceeded those figures.
Why do shutdowns keep happening?
The United States is virtually alone among advanced democracies in regularly shutting down its federal government over budget disputes. Understanding why requires examining fundamental changes to how the yearly federal budget has been constructed.
Since the modern budget process was established under the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, the U.S. federal government has shut down 10 times over budget disagreements. The first shutdown occurred under Ronald Reagan in late 1981, lasting two days after he vetoed a spending bill that lacked the spending cuts he had proposed.
Significant later shutdowns included the two shutdowns in 1995 and 1996 under Bill Clinton, surrounding deep budget cuts to Medicare, education, and environmental programs that Clinton opposed. The 2013 shutdown under Barack Obama lasted 16 days when House Republicans attempted to defund the Affordable Care Act through spending bills, which the Democratic Senate and Obama refused.
The 2018-2019 shutdown under Donald Trump arose over his demand for $5.7 billion in border wall funding that Democrats rejected. It ended only after his approval ratings plummeted and he signed the funding measure, albeit without wall funding. It became the longest on record, at 35 days — until the most recent one.
The recurring nature of shutdowns erodes public confidence. As the BBC stated, “The prolonged standoff highlights a level of legislative brinkmanship uncommon among advanced democracies.”
According to Dr. Peters, the persistence of shutdowns reflects how “the party line seems to govern decisions now as opposed to classical democratic principles of voting issue-by-issue,” raising the question of whether politicians’ primary duty is “to agree with the party or to represent the issues of their constituents?”
What does this reveal about the American government?
The 43-day shutdown exposed a political system willing to suspend food aid, delay paychecks, furlough workers, and disrupt air travel in pursuit of leverage over policy disputes between Democrats and Republicans.
The final funding bill deferred the central disagreement entirely, setting up a mid-December showdown, during which neither party’s proposal survived. Meanwhile, millions of Americans still face staggering premium increases. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that annual premiums for subsidized enrollees are expected to increase by 114%, from an average of $888 in 2025 to $1,904 in 2026.
From unpaid essential employees to disrupted flights, the economic and social toll was widespread, highlighting the fragility of systems that rely on continuous federal funding and the disproportionate burdens placed on those outside of Congress’s own protected paychecks. Six weeks of suffering were followed by a partial reprieve, leaving the door open for an unresolved disagreement to take hold yet again.
