How Government Shutdowns Work, and Why They Keep Happening

For most of American history, a government shutdown was not a thing. Today it is a regular part of how Washington works. In the last twelve months alone, the country went through the longest full shutdown in its history and then an even longer shutdown of a single department.

Right now, there is no shutdown on the horizon for a few more months. In early September 2026, Congress passed a stopgap funding law that keeps the government open through December 11, 2026. The Senate approved it 90 to 6 and the House approved it 370 to 48, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. That sets up the next deadline for just after the midterm elections.

So this is a good moment to step back and explain how shutdowns actually work. What causes them, what closes, what stays open, who gets paid, and why Congress keeps ending up here.

Where federal money comes from

Every dollar a federal agency spends has to be approved by Congress. The Constitution says so directly: no money can be drawn from the Treasury except through appropriations made by law.

Most of the day to day government runs on what is called discretionary spending. Congress provides it each year through twelve separate appropriations bills. Each bill covers a slice of the government, such as defense, agriculture, or the combined bill for labor, health, and education programs.

The federal fiscal year starts on October 1. If Congress has passed all twelve bills by then, agencies have their money for the year and nothing dramatic happens. That almost never occurs. Congress has rarely finished all twelve bills on time in recent decades.

When the bills are not done, Congress usually passes a continuing resolution, often called a CR. A CR is a temporary law that keeps agencies running, usually at the previous year's funding levels, for a set number of weeks or months. The current CR is exactly that. As of early September, all twelve of the House's funding bills for fiscal year 2027 had passed committee, but only two had passed the full House, according to CRFB's tracker.

A shutdown happens when the old funding runs out and neither the full year bills nor a CR has been signed into law. The Government Accountability Office defines it simply: a shutdown is the gap between when an appropriation expires and when a new one is enacted.

The law that forces the lights off

The reason agencies actually stop working is a law called the Antideficiency Act. It bars federal officials from spending money or signing contracts that Congress has not funded. It also bars agencies from accepting volunteer work, which is why a federal employee cannot simply decide to keep working for free during a shutdown.

As GAO explains on its shutdown resource page, this protects Congress's power over spending. If agencies could keep operating without money, the executive branch could effectively ignore the budget process.

Interestingly, funding gaps did not always lead to closures. Before 1980, agencies generally kept operating through short lapses and assumed Congress would pay the bills later. That changed after Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued legal opinions in 1980 and 1981 saying the Antideficiency Act meant what it said. Agencies had to stop work that was not specifically allowed to continue. The Congressional Research Service describes those opinions as the start of the modern shutdown.

What stays open during a shutdown

A shutdown does not turn off the whole government. GAO describes a two step test for deciding what continues.

Step one: is there money from somewhere else? Some programs do not depend on the annual spending bills at all. Social Security benefits, for example, are paid through a permanent appropriation, so checks keep going out. Medicare benefits also continue. Some agencies have leftover money from multiyear funding, and some run on fees that Congress lets them spend outside the annual process.

Step two: does an exception apply? If there is no money available, work can continue only if the law allows it. The biggest exception covers activities needed to protect human life and property. That is why air traffic controllers, border agents, federal law enforcement officers, and staff providing hospital care keep working.

Employees doing this protected work are called excepted employees. They keep showing up, but they do not get paid until the shutdown ends. Everyone else is furloughed, which means they are sent home without pay and are not allowed to work.

Every agency keeps a written plan for exactly this. The Office of Management and Budget posts these agency contingency plans, which spell out how many employees each agency expects to keep working and what activities will stop.

What closes

The effects depend on which agencies lose funding and how long the gap lasts. Common examples from past shutdowns include:

• Delays in processing applications, permits, and loans that depend on federal staff
• Reduced services at national parks and museums
• Paused inspections, grant reviews, and research at some agencies
• Slower call centers and backlogs that last for months after the government reopens

Many of the costs show up after the shutdown ends. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget's shutdown explainer notes that the 2013 shutdown left the IRS with a backlog of about 1.2 million income and Social Security number verification requests, and that more than 10,000 Medicare applicants were temporarily turned away every day.

What happens to federal workers' pay

For decades, Congress paid furloughed workers after every shutdown, but it had to pass a new law each time to do it. In January 2019, during the 35 day partial shutdown, Congress passed the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act, which was meant to guarantee back pay to both furloughed and excepted employees after any future shutdown. The Office of Personnel Management references that law in its furlough guidance.

That guarantee was tested in 2025. During the October shutdown, the White House budget office argued that furloughed workers were not automatically entitled to back pay unless Congress wrote it into the bill that ended the shutdown. Members of both parties disputed that reading of the law, as Federal News Network reported. The deal that reopened the government in November settled the question for that shutdown by explicitly providing back pay and reversing layoffs made during the shutdown, according to Axios.

Federal contractors are in a different position. The back pay law covers federal employees, not the private companies and workers who hold government contracts. Contractor employees who are sent home often never recover the lost wages.

A short history of shutdowns

GAO counts 20 shutdowns with at least one full day without funding between fiscal years 1977 and 2019. Most were short, often over a weekend, and barely noticed. A handful stand out:

• 1995 and 1996: Two shutdowns during a fight between President Clinton and the Republican Congress over the budget, lasting 26 days in total.
• 2013: A 16 day shutdown over the Affordable Care Act.
• December 2018 to January 2019: A 35 day partial shutdown over funding for a border wall. Several agencies were already funded, so it only hit part of the government. The Congressional Budget Office estimated it delayed about $18 billion in federal spending.
• October 1 to November 12, 2025: A 43 day shutdown, the longest full shutdown in American history, as NPR reported. The November deal passed three full year funding bills and extended everything else to January 30, 2026.
• January 31 to February 3, 2026: A brief partial shutdown when the January deadline passed before the House finished a new funding package.
• February 14 to April 30, 2026: A shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security alone, over immigration enforcement. It lasted 76 days, the longest shutdown of any agency in U.S. history, according to CBS News. It ended when the House passed a bill funding most of the department, but not Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Border Patrol, NPR reported.

The 2026 homeland security fight showed a newer pattern. Because the rest of the government already had its funding, the dispute could be isolated to a single department. And because much of immigration enforcement had been funded separately through a 2025 law, the agencies at the center of the fight kept operating while other parts of the department, like airport security, bore the strain.

What shutdowns cost

A common argument during shutdowns is that closing the government saves money. The evidence points the other way.

CBO found that the 2018 and 2019 partial shutdown reduced economic output by about $11 billion over two quarters, and that about $3 billion of that would never be recovered. Most of the delayed spending eventually happens, but furloughed workers are paid for time they were not allowed to work, and agencies spend money shutting down and restarting.

A 2019 Senate investigation found that the shutdowns in 2013, 2018, and 2019 cost taxpayers nearly $4 billion, as summarized by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Those figures do not count harder to measure costs, like businesses that could not get a federal permit or loan and delayed hiring as a result.

How shutdowns end

Every shutdown ends the same way: Congress passes a funding law and the President signs it. The only question is what kind of law.

Sometimes it is a short CR that simply reopens the government and pushes the fight to a later date. Sometimes it is a package of full year bills. When Congress bundles several bills together, the result is called a minibus. When it bundles most or all of them, it is an omnibus.

The political dynamics are usually the same. One side wants a policy concession in exchange for its votes. The other side refuses to negotiate while the government is closed. Pressure builds as missed paychecks, flight delays, and closed services pile up, until enough members decide the cost of holding out is higher than the cost of a deal.

In the Senate, most funding bills need 60 votes to get past a filibuster, which gives the minority party real leverage. That is a big reason shutdowns happen even when one party controls Congress and the White House.

Can states shut down too?

Yes. State governments can also run out of spending authority when the legislature and governor fail to agree on a budget. Most states start their fiscal year on July 1, so state shutdowns tend to happen in early July.

Minnesota is the best known example. Its state government shut down from July 1 to July 20, 2011, after a budget standoff between the legislature and the governor, and a partial shutdown in 2005 lasted nearly two weeks, according to the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library.

State shutdowns are less common than federal ones. Nearly every state has a balanced budget requirement, and a missed state budget deadline is usually settled within days.

What the next deadline means

The current stopgap runs through December 11, 2026. That leaves Congress about five weeks after the November elections to either pass the fiscal year 2027 bills, pass another CR, or risk another shutdown during the holidays.

A few things are worth watching between now and then:

• Whether the House and Senate agree on total spending levels. Nearly every fight starts with the overall number, not the details.
• Which bills move first. Bills with broad support, like military construction and veterans' programs, often pass early and get split off from the harder fights.
• The election results. A lame duck Congress behaves differently depending on which party is about to take control in January.

If you work on an issue that depends on federal funding, the weeks before a deadline are when decisions get made. Appropriations staff are writing final numbers, and a clear, specific request that shows what the money does in a member's own district is far more likely to survive the final package than a general letter of support. The quiet period before December is the time to have those conversations, not the week the government is about to close.

Shutdowns feel like chaos, but they follow rules. Knowing those rules makes it much easier to see what is really at stake the next time the clock starts running.