Auntil After government shutdowns, this one has so far not experienced the 24-hour chaos of its predecessors. There were no dramatic late-night clashes in Congress, no stock market crashes caused by panicked investors, no prime-time presidential speeches in the Oval Office. Even the chyron clocks of cable news channels are gone.
But in the reality show that has replaced a properly functioning democratic system of governance, we are quickly approaching the time when a shutdown will stop being a subject for political bluster and start harming Americans. And even as President Donald Trump and his allies have tried to direct the damage from what he derisively calls “the shutdown of the Democratic radical left” toward “Democratic things,” the pain will soon be felt as acutely in MAGA country as in liberal areas.
Over the next week, a series of cables will be pulled within the federal bureaucracy and the U.S. economy as a whole. If past shutdowns are any guide, these developments will force Congress and the White House — who have thus far spent more time trading Internet memes than offering serious settlement proposals — to begin negotiating in earnest to end this situation.
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 struggling due to staffing shortages: Airports across the country, including those in Chicago, Las Vegas, Newark and Washington, D.C., are reporting delays. There has been a “slight increase” in the number of air traffic controllers – who still have to report to work – calling in sick, the Transport Secretary (and Real world: Boston alumnus) Sean Duffy said Monday, the same day, that the air traffic control tower at Hollywood Burbank Airport was shut down due to a lack of staff. Next week, air traffic controllers and the military will not receive their first salary. With one week until the extended tax filing deadline, the IRS laid off thousands of workers this morning after running out of funds from the previous year. Government programs that have managed to stay afloat with leftover money — including funds to provide formula and support low-income mothers and their babies — are quickly running out of money. President Trump recently suggested he would carry out mass layoffs of public employees if a solution is not found by this weekend – and that a large number of jobs will “never come back.” (Furloughed workers are already expected to miss their first paycheck on Friday.)
Few Americans have a comprehensive understanding of the “trillions of things the government is doing that are going to start to really bite,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me. People also don’t understand how quickly one shutdown can set off a catastrophic chain reaction. “When things you can’t even imagine start to break, damage starts to happen. And then, at that point, global investors say, ‘Oh, maybe this is something very different from what I’ve seen in the past.'”
Congressional Democrats and Republicans — who are still on the payroll — have made little effort to negotiate a deal to reopen the government. House lawmakers have largely stayed away from Washington since passing a seven-week funding bill last month. The Senate 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 funding shortfall an “unprecedented opportunity” to cut the federal workforce — a threat he has yet to make good on — and, more recently, suggesting he is ready to strike a deal with Democrats on the upcoming expiration of health care subsidies at the heart of the impasse.
Democratic lawmakers told me their constituents are urging them to stay the course, convinced they must take advantage of this rare opportunity to stand up to Trump’s norm-defying presidency and fight to prevent health insurance premiums from skyrocketing next year. Republicans, who have repeatedly said that any negotiations should only take place after Democrats vote to defund the government, appear equally convinced of the merits 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 everyone who read says, The art of the market might tell you, that’s generally not how negotiation works.
All of this highlights how bizarre the current shutdown is. In 2013, when the government was shut down for 16 days, lawmakers believed voters would punish those seen as complicit. The Republicans of the day eventually relented when it became clear that the public supported neither their tactics (threat of shutdown) nor their mission (repeal of the Affordable Care Act). “Obviously, Washington is a lot different right now,” Doug Heye, a Republican strategist who worked in House leadership at the time, told me. Today, no one fears the political consequences, he said.
But today, as millions of Americans face the looming pressure of shutdowns, that calculus could change. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, acknowledged yesterday that if Congress doesn’t pass a bill to fund the government by Monday, there won’t be enough time to process the Oct. 15 paychecks for active-duty military troops. But the House, which has not held a vote since September 19, is not expected to resume until Monday. Johnson also noted that the shutdown is “already causing crippling economic losses,” he told reporters yesterday, citing a White House report that found a $15 billion drop in gross domestic product for each week of government shutdown.
The federal food assistance program, known as WIC, entered the government shutdown with only enough funding to last the first seven to 10 days, Georgia Machell, president and CEO of the National WIC Association, told me. Anything above that threshold “is really going to start putting babies and young children and pregnant women at risk,” she said, meaning that this weekend about 6 million people could start losing their benefits. WIC programs on military bases have already been shut down, Machell told me. Yesterday, the White House announced that Trump would reallocate tariff revenue dollars to extend WIC funding for the foreseeable future.
The move signals Trump’s awareness that as president he will bear much of the responsibility for how the shutdown will harm Americans, even as his administration places banners on government websites blaming Democrats for the crisis. When I contacted the White House to ask about all of this, spokesperson Abigail Jackson sent me a statement emphasizing the Democrats’ “sweeping demands.”
At the same time, other repercussions of the closure will become very visible in the coming days. The Smithsonian Institution was able to stay open during the first week of the shutdown, thanks to funding from previous years, but it is now expected to close its museums, research centers and the National Zoo on Sunday. Most “IRS operations are closed,” the agency posted on its website. The Treasury Department has provided furloughed workers with a form letter to give to their creditors, suggesting that financial institutions offer “relief arrangements” to borrowers who may have difficulty paying their bills. “At this time, we cannot predict when pay may resume for furloughed employees,” the letter states.
The private sector also has good reason to be scared. In a letter to congressional leaders last month, the US Travel Association said a lack of government funding could cost the economy $1 billion every week.
Some Republicans have paled 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 they would receive back pay once the government reopened. The cost of compensating employees who are not working is approximately $400 million per day. The Office of Management and Budget this week floated the idea of not restoring wages to furloughed workers, Axios reported Tuesday, although congressional leaders have largely rejected attempts by the White House to legally justify such a move. “There is no better symbol of Washington’s waste than paying non-essential bureaucrats $400 million a day to not work,” wrote Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, in an Oct. 3 letter to Russell Vought, OMB director charged with implementing Project 2025.
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 it was furloughing 3,000 workers, saying “the number of affected employees is expected to increase each week in the event of a prolonged shutdown.” This time around, the company has been less clear about its intentions, although a spokesperson didn’t rule out the possibility of furloughs when I asked if layoffs were planned. “We are working with our U.S. government customers to assess the impact on our employees, programs, suppliers, and business, while supporting essential and critical programs and mitigating the impact on our operations,” spokesperson Cailin Schmeer told me in an email.
More than 40,000 private sector workers could be laid off if the shutdown lasts a month, the White House Council of Economic Advisers said in a report released last week. Although many economists say the United States will recover from any hit to its gross domestic product once the government reopens, some private businesses will likely never recover all the revenue they lost, Phillip L. Swagel, director of the Congressional Budget Office, wrote in a letter to Ernst last week.
Pete’s Diner on Capitol Hill in Washington is one such business. Speaking from a near-empty restaurant at lunchtime earlier this week, owner Gum Tong told me that business had fallen by around 80 percent since the lockdown began. She has tried to avoid laying off employees, many of whom have worked at 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. I hope they can get everyone back to work and back to their lives soon.”
