John,
Congress has just a few weeks left to pass a funding bill and avoid another completely preventable shutdown. But the risk is real. This week, our chief strategist Ryan Clancy hosted a call where he shared seven reasons a shutdown is likely to happen, and why both parties will be blamed if it does. Watch the clip here.
I am sure you agree that a shutdown is bad, but it is worse than that. It is disgraceful. It is embarrassing and it hurts millions, including businesses, military families, moms with young kids, air travelers, and public servants, just for starters. Here is how.
Small businesses that work with the federal government will stop getting paid. Almost 30% of federal contracting dollars go to small businesses, some of them family-run. A Fortune 500 company will be fine if the government delays payment to them. For a small business, a few missed payments can mean missing payroll.
Service members will keep doing their jobs without a paycheck. Under current law, troops stay on duty but don’t get paid during a shutdown. A junior enlisted service member earns $30,000 per year. Forty-five percent of all service members say they have trouble making ends meet. How can anyone defend purposely denying them and their families a paycheck they need to keep food on the table? Read more about the often-challenging financial circumstances of service members here.
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers will be legally barred from doing their jobs. They cannot go into the office. They cannot open their laptops. They cannot answer email. And when the shutdown ends, taxpayers will still pay them for the time they were forced to sit idle.
Air travel will become less safe and less reliable. In 2019, staffing shortages during a shutdown triggered a ground stop at LaGuardia and widespread flight delays across the Northeast. Air traffic controllers and TSA officers were working without pay.
Millions of moms and young children could lose access to nutrition assistance. 6.2 million Americans — mostly low-income pregnant, postpartum women and kids under 5 — receive an average of $35-45 per month in WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) benefits. These benefits could start running out within days of a shutdown.
Public health and medical research will slow down. The FDA scales back inspections. CDC disease surveillance — the kind that catches measles and other disease outbreaks — gets interrupted. NIH pauses most new patient enrollments in clinical trials. You cannot make that time up later.
The economy will fly blind. A shutdown halts key federal data releases on jobs, inflation, and GDP — just as the Fed is weighing a possible rate cut. If that data goes dark, policymakers, markets, and investors will need to make hugely consequential decisions — on where to set interest rates and invest — with incomplete information.
And all of this costs money.
The last major shutdown in 2018–2019 delayed about $18 billion in federal spending and erased $3 billion in economic output permanently. No Labels’ policy team has closely studied all the shutdowns from the previous 15 years, and here’s the big takeaway: No one wins and everyone loses.
The members of Congress who force shutdowns think they can get some big policy win out of it. They don’t. One party figures they can blame the other and get some long-term political benefit. They don’t get that either.
In the movie Animal House, when Bluto was angry at Faber College for kicking their fraternity off campus, he said this “situation really requires a futile and stupid gesture.”
That’s all a government shutdown is: A futile and stupid gesture.
That is why Congress must work together this month to prevent another shutdown. Members need to somehow find a way to build the trust required to get a deal done. The only way to build trust is to practice it, and that is exactly what will happen at the upcoming bicameral meeting hosted by No Labels on Thursday, September 11.
The topic will be permitting and regulatory reform, which is so desperately needed to build infrastructure, housing, electric grid capacity, and so many other things we need. But the message is bigger than that. Democrats and Republicans will show that it is still possible to sit down together and solve problems. And that is exactly the kind of cooperation we need to avoid a shutdown and move the country forward.
