By: DR. PETER MEILAENDER
Updated 11:50 a.m. EDT, 25 Oct 2025
The United States (US) Government shut down on Oct. 1, 2025, and is now the second-longest running shutdown in US history. A government shutdown occurs when Congress fails to pass bills that allocate funding for government programs and agencies. This shutdown is caused by a disagreement over how much should be allocated towards government health agencies. The bill, created to avoid the shutdown, passed in the House of Representatives, but not the Senate.
This article is a different style of “news” than our usual news articles. It leans towards opinion rather than solely reporting facts. We hope you can still appreciate the value of this piece as an insight into a complicated issue.
-Your STAR Editors
You may have heard—just maybe—that the federal government has shut down. About two weeks ago, as I write this. By the time you read it, it will have been almost a month, unless the shutdown has ended by then.
Your intrepid STAR editors, wanting to keep you informed, have invited me to share a few thoughts on the shutdown. They were operating on the theory that a political scientist ought to have something to say about it.
It was a reasonable theory, in theory. In practice, however, I’m afraid I have very little insight to offer on the subject of the government shutdown. I even tried to pawn the assignment off on a colleague who I thought might have more insightful things to say. Alas, he had no more ideas than I. He merely shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands, as if to say, “Whaddaya gonna do?”
Thus, the ball is back in my uninformed court. Fortunately, if there is one thing a professor knows—it is part of our training—it is that you never let ignorance stop you from talking. Even for 50 minutes at a stretch.
So here are three fairly unhelpful thoughts about the government shutdown.
First: There is always a risk when the government shuts down. A risk to the government itself. A risk that people might discover they didn’t need so much government in the first place. It’s like the old joke—okay, maybe only a joke for political scientists, but a joke nonetheless: “What if the government shut down…and nobody noticed?”
Unlike you blissfully young students, I am old enough to remember the event that got this shutdown ball rolling, the one that gave politicians a certain itch to shut things down every now and then. Back in the mid-1990s, Republicans led by Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, clashed with Democratic President Bill Clinton over spending cuts in the federal budget, resulting in a government shutdown that lasted several weeks. (There had, in fact, been a previous, very short shutdown in 1990 when Gingrich faced off against Republican President George Bush.) Politically, the shutdown was costly for Republicans, and history has not judged Gingrich kindly on the matter. But history in this case is largely mistaken. The truth about that shutdown is—and these next two words must be whispered in hushed tones, because they contravene conventional wisdom—nothing happened. Unless you’d been planning to vacation at a national park, you probably didn’t even realize anything had changed.
So part of me thinks a government shutdown is no big deal and presents an opportunity to reflect upon the things our government does that maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t need to do.
Second: But there is also another part of me, and that other part thinks that government shutdowns are a bad thing. Because let’s face it, shutting down the government is really just not the sort of thing that grown-ups do. It’s sort of the political equivalent of saying, “I’ll take my ball and go home.”
The national government performs lots of valuable activities daily, beginning with federal law enforcement, security, and national defense, but extending well beyond those core functions. It guards our borders. It maintains interstate highways. It monitors goods entering the country. It mails out Social Security checks. It collects taxes. It conducts food safety inspections. It prints money. It operates our federal court system. It provides food stamps. It oversees our space program. It runs the post office. It funds student loans. And of course, there are those national parks.
Once we get past national defense, we can argue about exactly what the federal government’s role in all these areas ought to be. I’ve put together a list that contains some items likely to appeal to political conservatives and others likely to appeal to political liberals. But it’s silly to pretend that these aren’t important tasks, or that they don’t serve valuable goals, or that they don’t have significant effects on the lives and well-being of citizens. Letting them all grind to a halt simply because one doesn’t get one’s way politically—or gets only half a loaf instead of a whole loaf—is irresponsible.
Third: We are, unfortunately, engaged in what seems to be a permanent game of political chicken between the two parties. Under current conditions, this seems unlikely to change, so we may see recurrent threats of a shutdown, just as we experience repeated showdowns over raising the debt ceiling or defaulting on the national debt. (Which would be even worse and more irresponsible than a federal shutdown.)
There are many reasons for this. Analyzing them would take us well beyond the limits of a short essay on the federal shutdown and would, frankly, call for someone with considerably more expertise on Congress than I possess. But they include everything from a long-range “sorting” of political parties that has made both of them more ideologically extreme; the baneful influence of primary elections; the enormous stakes of losing an election when the federal government has grown as large as it is; a weakening of federalism and a concomitant centralization of power; and a degraded culture of public debate that rewards infantile loudmouths and 280-character clickbait polemics.
Underlying all of this is a Congress that has become increasingly dysfunctional for the past twenty to thirty years. The most pressing short-term dangers to American democracy are the authoritarian impulses of President Trump, his disdain for the rule of law, and his apparent determination to destroy all international sympathy for the United States. But the greatest long-term danger to it is the inability of Congress to fulfill its legislative role as the first branch of government. As long as Congress fails to perform its core functions, it will continue to invite executive overreach—as was the case already in the Obama and Biden administrations, before the presidency was even a gleam in Donald Trump’s eye.
And our politicians will continue to think they are not doing their job unless they shut things down every now and again.★
