The US Congress has one big job to do every year. It may do all sorts of business, but one job rises above all others – it must fund the government by passing a budget.
The Constitution of 1789 states upfront in Article 1 Section 9: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.”
Budget deadline approaches
The 1974 Congressional Budget Act mandates that the fiscal year begins on 1 October and ends on 30 September of the following year. Every representative and senator knows that the deadline for passing a budget is 30 September.
In theory, the process begins in late January or early February when the president delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. Timing depends on the date of the National Football League’s Super Bowl championship game. No president would dare interfere with that. The speech lays out his agenda (no ‘her’ yet) for the coming year… again, in theory. Recently, the State of the Union address has become more like a political rally, but that’s an issue for another day.
Congress then has eight months to draft, debate, revise, amend and pass an annual budget. Plenty of time, right? Wrong! These 538 learned men and women in the nation’s highest deliberative body have managed to pass a budget by 30 September only four times since 1977.
To repeat, four times in five decades. It’s been 28 years since the last on-time budget. If Congress fails, the government has to shut down on 1 October, which has happened four times in the last ten years.
Government shutdown looms
The worst shutdown occurred from December 2018 to January 2019 when Congress wouldn’t appropriate $5bn for Trump’s border wall and he refused to sign the budget. (It seems he forgot his claim that Mexico would pay for it.) The government shut down for 35 days and cost the public purse $11bn.
In order to avoid this sort of fiasco, Congress usually comes up with a continuing resolution by 30 September to keep the government functioning until it can pass a ‘real’ budget. There has been a total of 207 continuing resolutions since 1977. For the 2001 fiscal year, Congress had to pass 21 continuing resolutions to prevent a shutdown (no joke).
Under a continuing resolution, government agencies are allowed to carry on their normal work at the same level as the expired budget. Any expense not essential to routine activities requires a waiver, which in turn requires a lot of jumping through hoops. I worked as a contractor with USAID/Tanzania for 16 years. Among my several duties, I took field trips up-country to monitor projects outside our air-conditioned offices in Dar es Salaam. These were not considered essential when a continuing resolution was in effect, which was practically every year.
Mid-term elections on the horizon
This brings us to September 2025, when Congress should pass a budget or a continuing resolution before the 30th. The Republican House has passed a stopgap measure that is now with the Senate. It contains massive cuts to healthcare programmes. This puts the Senate Democrats between a rock and the deep blue sea. They either have to pass a measure they utterly oppose or the government shuts down, which nobody wants.
In my opinion, this mess is not about budgets. Rather, it’s about the 2026 mid-term elections.
To explain, we have to go back 30 years to 1995. The Republican Party (nicknamed the GOP) controlled both houses of Congress. The GOP passed a budget that Democrat president Bill Clinton wouldn’t sign due to deep cuts in his programmes for education, the environment, and… wait for it… healthcare. The government shut down for five days. The GOP passed a continuing resolution in order to call Clinton’s bluff. He wouldn’t dare refuse to sign a second time? He dared. The government shut down again for 21 days. The GOP finally came up with a budget that Clinton would sign.
The first shutdown furloughed 800,000 government workers; the second furloughed 284,000. According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the two shutdowns cost $1.4bn. But those shutdowns were not really about the budget; they were about the upcoming 1996 presidential election. The GOP submitted a budget they knew the president wouldn’t sign because they figured that voters would blame Clinton for the shutdowns. It backfired. Slick Willie made sure voters blamed the GOP, who proceeded to get clobbered in 1996.
The impact of Donald Trump
It seems to me 2025 is déjà vu all over again. There’s one big difference between 1995 and 2025 – Donald Trump.
Republicans are way more afraid of Trump than they are of the Democrats. Any Republican who seems to be deviating in the slightest from Trump’s agenda might not get his endorsement in 2026 and lose the GOP primary. It happened to Liz Cheney, a solid conservative, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and the third-highest-ranking Republican member in the House of Representatives. Liz was vice-chair of the committee that impeached Trump in 2019. Trump made sure she lost her GOP primary for re-election in 2020.
Another factor: in 1995, the Democrats had a leader – President Clinton, a very smooth talker. In 2025, they don’t seem to have an agreed-upon leader – not a Clinton (or Obama) – to convince voters next year that the shutdown is all the GOP’s fault.
According to the most recent Gallup poll, 40% of those surveyed approve of Trump; 56% disapprove. Only 35% of independents approve. As bad as that is for Trump, the Democrats are in even worse shape. A recent CNBC poll has Democrats with a 24% positive rating and a 56% negative rating.
Late on 23 September, Trump’s OMB sent out a memo telling agencies to identify programmes, projects and activities where discretionary funding will stop if the government shuts down on 1 October. This could result in massive firings of federal employees, euphemistically called ‘reduction in force’.
The executive director of public employees for environmental responsibility issued the following statement: “The plan to exploit a shutdown to purge federal workers is illegal, unconstitutional, and deeply disturbing. A shutdown triggers furloughs, not firings.”
Two million federal workers do not know whether they will be considered essential and stay on the job receiving pay checks, whether they will be temporarily furloughed, or whether they will be permanently riffed. The outlook isn’t brilliant, no matter how you view it. The US government will almost certainly shut down on 1 October. For how long? No one knows. Who will voters blame in 2026? No one knows… yet.
