It is not every day that one sees the federal government shut down. While this seems like a scary situation, and it can be, the reality is that this has happened before and will likely happen again in today’s hyper-tribalized political landscape.
I would know. I was a congressional staffer during the 2018 government shutdown.
There is a bit of a silver lining: an opportunity to trim the federal government’s fat. President Trump and his administration are already reining in the federal government through long-overdue layoffs across the board. These layoffs free up federal dollars to serve American citizens. They make the government skinnier and remove the teeth of the sprawling bureaucracy that resists accountability.
One of Congress’s constitutional duties is to ensure the federal government is funded and working for the American people.
It has failed to do this. In more sensible times, the shutdown might be a crisis that shouldn’t be wasted: with the political conversation focused on funding, now would be the time to begin surgery on the federal government’s bloated belly.
But that takes either one party having a working majority or bipartisanship. The American voters keep mandating a closely divided Congress and likely will for the foreseeable future. As for bipartisanship, this is the Era of Bad Feelings, with no love lost between the president’s party and the minority. So that raises the question: what can Congress do in its current state?
One option is to cede more authority to the Executive Branch, but the separation of powers has already been stretched. DOGE moved quickly to unilaterally trim fat, but without the power to defund duly legislated agencies and programs, it could only nibble around the edges. Even when it works, it can result in an overpowered executive and a coddled, denuded legislature, leading to more inaction or rubber-stamping. The Founders rightly decreed that Congress has the sole power to make laws, and the executive has the duty to enforce them. Congress has already ceded too much to the president, which tipped the scales of the federal government out of balance.
Another option is for Congress to get itself together and finally start getting into the dirt. Over the past three decades, for nearly as long as I’ve been alive, lawmakers opted to focus on re-election efforts and messaging legislation over the core parts of their jobs. Legislation became a campaigning tool, not the process by which our nation establishes its laws, and the critical needs of the nation were and continue to be ignored in favor of hyper-partisan priorities designed to rally an electoral base and save a lawmaker’s job. Shutdowns are a consequence. Our government is at a standstill over nonsensical spending demands to score partisan political points and an inability on either side to see the forest for the trees.
To fix it, Congress must do its job.
The reality of the matter is that the nation’s fiscal heart is bleeding out under the weight of trillions of dollars of debt. Congress’s quick Band-Aids are failing. Congress’s true mission is not to get quick fixes across the finish line, but to balance the budget and bring us out of the fiscal hole we are continuing to dig. That begins with investigating the less-than-savory federal programs and taking an axe to them where needed.
Nowhere on the ballot did Americans on either side of the aisle vote for hundreds of millions of our collective taxpayer dollars to go to tulip planting in Timbuktu, crop circle research in Caligula, or financial literacy classes in North Korea. While these programs (likely) don’t or didn’t exist, the absurdity is that these made-up money pits easily fit into the financial mismanagement Congress has engaged in since I was a dewy-eyed child in Texas. Sadly, I scarcely remember a day when my future and the future of the younger generations around me were truly taken into account. Now there is a real risk that some Americans may not be able to buy a home at all.
It's time for Congress to get it together and fund the government while trimming some fat. Then, they can get to the real job of giving the federal government the liposuction it desperately needs.