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**SEPTEMBER 30, 2025**

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I don’t think there's a word I hate more in the English language than “narrative,” but the narrative of the government shutdown, which will in all likelihood trigger at midnight tonight, is all wrong. The narrative is intended to depict a Good Thing (the government is funded) and a Bad Thing (the government is not) when we’ve actually been in the Bad place, practically speaking, since Trump’s inauguration. This confusion makes it hard to tell the truth about the situation as it is. So Whitney Curry Wimbish and I tried to set the record straight [link removed].

**–David Dayen, executive editor**

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Evan Vucci/AP Photo

The Government Has Been Shut Down for Months [link removed]

**By David Dayen and Whitney Curry Wimbish**

Talks at the White House on Monday aimed at preventing a government shutdown left both sides far apart [link removed] on a deal. Earlier in the day, reports emerged that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) would consider [link removed] a ten-day extension of government funding if Trump agreed to negotiate on enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that expire at the end of the year.

Reaction to this was swift. “You don’t pick a fight and then run away,” said Emma Lydon, managing director of P Street, the government relations arm of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Within a couple of hours, Schumer told reporters that he would not back a short-term funding agreement under any circumstances. But one bigger problem with the conversation around government funding, with less than 24 hours to the deadline, is the nature of the fight being picked.

The negotiations and debates are operating under the premise that appropriations to federal agencies are flowing today and will stop flowing tomorrow, and that this is something political leaders want to avoid. It’s hard to uncover any evidence that this is truly the case. The Supreme Court’s latest ruling [link removed] definitively allows the Trump administration to cancel whatever funding they disfavor within 45 days of the end of the appropriation, without any approval from Congress. About 12 percent of the federal workforce [link removed] has been terminated.

The larger point is that the government is already shut down, and has been for several months, as the Trump administration initiated an assault on this system of government. Activities deemed “essential” by the president—stalking immigrants, lobbing missiles at Iran, etc.—have gone on, but activities purported to conflict with the president’s policies, regardless of whether they have been authorized by the lawmaking body of the United States, have been stopped, interrupted only by occasional federal courts telling the president that doing so is illegal, which the Supreme Court subsequently brushes aside.

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