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This is the third long government shutdown I have lived through. I was an active duty Marine at Camp Lejeune during the 2013 shutdown, stationed on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon during the 2018-19 shutdown, and I am again at the Pentagon during the current shutdown after being activated for a year starting this summer.
Here are some insights on what that has been like.
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The thing that jumps out the most for me is how incredibly scary the shutdowns are for junior enlisted service members and many others who are living on the edge. If you’ve lived month-to-month before, you understand the fear and the anxiety. It’s especially troubling because a lot of people who join the military grew up as children in paycheck-to-paycheck families, and one of the huge draws of the military (or the government, for civilian employees) was that it would finally give them stability.
At the beginning of the shutdown, for example, I overheard a conversation between a junior service member and his senior enlisted boss. They were going over how little the junior service member had eaten in the last couple of days, how he supported his parents and siblings back home, and how he wasn’t sure what he was going to do if his next paycheck didn’t come in. He and his mentor were developing a plan to get some food in his stomach and take care of him, in case that paycheck didn’t come through.
To be real about this: a lot of military service members are on the edge. We are talking about a large group of people who are making very little money– but, like that kid, still make a lot more than anyone in their family is making or ever made while they were growing up. They have real “eat or not eat” obligations not just with immediate family, if they have one of their own, but often with their parents, grandparents, siblings, or others.
Fortunately for this servicemember, and many others on the edge, after an immense amount of stress, their pay did come through on the 15th this month. But the anxiety hasn’t gone away, because unlike my first shutdown, in 2013, there hasn’t been a last minute deal by Congress and the President to approve paying the troops.
At the same time anxiety is building over their pay, stress is building because, with the civilian workforce furloughed, the military folks are doing more work than ever before to cover the gap.
And we haven’t even gotten into the hundreds of thousands of military reservists, many of whom rely on their reserve duty and paychecks to make ends meet, who can’t work and aren’t getting paid at all. For those of them who are federal employees and reservists, their entire income is gone.
Meanwhile, the civilians who are at work are working for no pay (although they are required to get back pay when the government re-opens, so they will eventually be made whole).
Now, as bad as that is for individuals, I don’t think it’s even the worst part of these shutdowns. The biggest long-term risk of these shutdowns is the institutional damage it does to the government.
You see, we are living in a time where a lot of people question what the government does, and there are a lot of claims floating around that federal employees laze around all day and don’t do anything.
These “shut-downs” reinforce that idea in people’s minds because despite the fact that everyone is told the government is shut down, it isn’t really. In fact, a lot of the things that normal people would immediately notice haven’t shut down at all.
People still got their SNAP benefits (although we’ll see if they keep that up), social security still came, and so did many of the other things that people have come to rely on from the government. The military is still there defending them and most of the gears are still churning because the “essential” personnel who keep them running are all working without pay to minimize the impact on everyone else as much as possible.
With supposedly the whole government shutdown and there being no obvious and immediate impact on people’s lives, the whole situation just reinforces the misconception that the government doesn’t do anything for anyone. A belief that, in the long term, is detrimental to us all and the result of which will leave America weaker. And it’s not like we have some sort of national service requirement to help folks learn the importance of our institutions when they are younger.
So, as much as they say that these shutdowns are bad in the short term, the long-term impact on perceptions might be the thing that ultimately leads to the most damage and it’s the thing I hope you all can help prevent when you are talking to people about the government shutdown.
I hope everyone is doing ok out there!
Lucas
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The views expressed in this Substack are those of the individual only and not those of the Department of Defense. Use of military rank, job titles, and photographs in uniform do not imply endorsement by the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.

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