As far as government shutdowns go, this one has so far lacked the round-the-clock chaos of its predecessors. There have been no dramatic late-night clashes on the floors of Congress, no steep stock-market plunges driven by panicked investors, no prime-time presidential addresses from the Oval Office. Even the running clocks on cable-news chyrons have disappeared.
But in the reality show that has replaced a properly functioning system of democratic governance, we are fast approaching the moment when a shutdown stops being a subject of political bluster and starts hurting Americans. And as much as President Donald Trump and his allies have tried to direct the damage from what he derisively calls “the Radical Left Democrat shutdown” toward “Democrat things,” the pain will soon be felt just as acutely in MAGA country as in liberal areas.
Over the next week, a series of wires in the federal bureaucracy and broader U.S. economy will be tripped. If past shutdowns are any guide, those developments will force Congress and the White House—which so far have spent more time trading internet memes than serious proposals for a settlement—to begin seriously negotiating a way to bring this to an end.
It’s not that the government shutdown is going well; it’s just not as bad as it will soon be. The nation’s air-traffic-control system is already buckling because of staffing shortages: Airports across the country, including Chicago, Las Vegas, Newark, and Washington, D.C., are reporting delays. There’s been a “slight uptick” in air traffic controllers—who must still report to work—calling out sick, Transportation Secretary (and Real World: Boston alum) Sean Duffy said Monday, the same day the air-traffic-control tower at Hollywood Burbank Airport was closed down because of insufficient staffing. Next week, air traffic controllers and members of the military will miss their first paychecks. With one week left before the extended tax-filing deadline, the IRS this morning furloughed thousands of workers after exhausting prior-year funds. Government programs that have been able to stay afloat using leftover money—including funding that helps provide formula and support for low-income mothers and their babies—are quickly running out of money. President Trump recently suggested that he would move forward with mass layoffs of government workers if there’s no resolution by this weekend—and that a lot of the jobs “will never come back.” (Furloughed workers are already set to miss their first paycheck on Friday.)
Few Americans have a comprehensive understanding of the “gazillion things that the government does that will start to really bite,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, told me. Nor do people understand how quickly a shutdown can set off a catastrophic chain reaction. “When things you can’t even imagine start to break, damage starts to occur. And then, at that point, global investors say, ‘Oh, maybe this is something very different than what I’ve seen in the past.’”
Democrats and Republicans in Congress—who are still getting paid—have made little effort to broker an agreement to reopen the government. House lawmakers have largely stayed out of Washington since passing a seven-week funding bill last month. The Senate has repeatedly held failed votes on the House bill, each time falling well short of the 60 votes needed to send it to Trump’s desk. Trump has vacillated between calling the lapse in funding “an unprecedented opportunity” to slash the federal workforce—a threat he has so far not carried out—and, more recently, suggesting that he is willing to cut a deal with Democrats over soon-expiring health-care subsidies at the heart of the stalemate.
Democratic lawmakers have told me their constituents are pushing them to hold the line, convinced that they must use this rare opportunity to stand up to Trump’s norm-defying presidency and fight to keep health-insurance premiums from soaring next year. Republicans, who have repeatedly said that any negotiations must take place only after Democrats vote to fund the government, appear similarly convinced of the righteousness of their position. A White House official, speaking anonymously to discuss internal strategy, told me the president is willing to have a policy debate with Democrats, but only after the government is open—which, as anyone who has read The Art of the Deal could tell you, is not typically how negotiating works.
All of this underscores just how bizarre the current shutdown is. In 2013, when the government closed for 16 days, lawmakers believed that voters would punish those seen as complicit in it. Republicans back then eventually caved when it became clear that the public did not support either their tactics (threatening a shutdown) or their mission (repealing the Affordable Care Act). “Obviously, it’s a very different Washington right now,” Doug Heye, a Republican strategist who worked in House leadership at the time, told me. Today, nobody fears political fallout, he said.
But today, as millions of Americans face the impending squeeze of the shutdown, that calculation may change. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, acknowledged yesterday that if Congress does not pass a bill to fund the government by Monday, there will not be enough time to process October 15 paychecks for active military troops. But the House, which has not held a vote since September 19, is not scheduled to return until Monday. Johnson also noted that the shutdown is already “resulting in crippling economic losses,” he told reporters yesterday, citing a White House report that found a $15 billion decline in gross domestic product for each week the government remains closed.
The federal food aid program, known as WIC, entered the government shutdown with only enough funding to last for the first seven to 10 days, Georgia Machell, president and CEO of the National WIC Association, told me. Anything beyond that point “is really going to start putting babies and young children and pregnant women at risk,” she said, meaning that sometime this weekend, about 6 million people could start losing benefits. WIC programs on military bases have already closed down, Machell told me. Yesterday, the White House announced that Trump would be repurposing dollars from tariff revenue to extend WIC funding for the foreseeable future.
The move indicates that Trump is aware of the fact that, as president, he will bear much of the responsibility for how the shutdown hurts Americans, even as his administration puts banners on government websites blaming the Democrats for the crisis. When I reached out to the White House to ask about all of this, the spokesperson Abigail Jackson sent me a statement that emphasized “Democrats’ radical demands.”
Meanwhile, additional knock-on effects of the shutdown will become highly visible in the coming days. The Smithsonian Institution was able to remain open for the first week of the shutdown, using funding from prior years, but is now scheduled to close its museums, its research centers, and the National Zoo on Sunday. Most IRS “operations are closed,” the agency posted on its website. The Treasury Department provided furloughed workers with a form letter to give to their creditors, suggesting that financial institutions offer “workout arrangements” for borrowers who might have trouble paying their bills. “At present, we cannot predict when pay may resume for furloughed employees,” the letter said.
The private sector has good reason to be spooked, too. In a letter to congressional leaders last month, the U.S. Travel Association said the lapse in government funding could cost the economy $1 billion each week.
Some Republicans have blanched at the amount of waste involved in a government shutdown. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that 750,000 federal workers had been furloughed, and noted that a 2019 law ensured that they will receive back pay once the government reopens. The cost of paying employees who are not working amounts to about $400 million a day. The Office of Management and Budget this week floated the idea of not restoring pay for furloughed workers, Axios reported Tuesday, though congressional leaders have largely dismissed the White House’s attempts at a legal justification for such a move. “There’s no better symbol of Washington’s wasteful spending than paying non-essential bureaucrats $400 million a day not to work,” Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, wrote in an October 3 letter to Russell Vought, the OMB director and Project 2025 enforcer.
Private companies may soon pressure Congress to act. In 2013, the last time the Pentagon was involved in a shutdown, it took less than a week for Lockheed Martin to announce that it was furloughing 3,000 workers, stating that “the number of employees affected is expected to increase weekly in the event of a prolonged shutdown.” This time around, the company has been less clear about its intentions, though a spokesperson did not rule out the potential for furloughs when I asked if any were being planned. “We are working with our U.S. government customers to assess the impact on our employees, programs, suppliers, and business, while supporting essential, mission-critical programs and mitigating the impact to our operations,” the spokesperson Cailin Schmeer told me in an email.
More than 40,000 private-sector employees could be put out of work if the shutdown lasts for a month, the White House Council of Economic Advisers said in a report released last week. Although many economists say that the United States will rebound from any hits to its gross domestic product once the government reopens, some private businesses will likely “never recover all of the income they lost,” Phillip L. Swagel, the Congressional Budget Office director, wrote last week in a letter to Ernst.
Pete’s Diner on Capitol Hill in Washington is one such company. Speaking from a mostly empty restaurant at lunchtime earlier this week, owner Gum Tong told me that business has fallen about 80 percent since the shutdown began. She has tried to avoid laying off employees, many of whom have been with the restaurant for years. “Our bills don’t stop when the government stops working,” she told me. “I hope this shutdown doesn’t last long. Hopefully they can let everybody go back to work, and get on with their own life soon.”
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