A government shutdown is looming. On Sept. 11, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that he and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries would demand specific health care provisions, including a reversal of the Medicaid cuts that were part of the recently passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” along with concrete assurances that the president could not undo them after passage, to keep the government running. But after they sought a meeting with Trump on the subject, the president announced on Sept. 23 that he had canceled it.
U.S. congressional Democrats are locked in a fierce debate over whether they should act to shut down the federal government to protest what they describe as President Donald Trump’s lawless conduct. The tactic would mean either withholding votes that Republicans need to pass a short-term measure to keep the government running after Sept. 30 (called a continuing resolution) or, alternatively, filibustering spending bills in the Senate. Jeffries and Schumer preferred to keep negotiating.
New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein recently intensified the internal Democratic debate with a column urging the party to seriously consider a shutdown despite the attendant risks, costs, and political fallout. Klein argued that Democrats need to be bold to wrest public attention from Trump and highlight the damage that the administration is inflicting. Like-minded liberals feel that Democrats can’t negotiate in good faith when Republicans cannot guarantee that the president will respect the outcome. In recent months, Trump has sought to circumvent legislation by using Nixonian strategies such as impoundment and pocket vetoes.
The strategic debate is significant, but the larger historical shift is even more striking: Federal government shutdowns are no longer abnormalities in U.S. politics. They have become routine weapons in partisan struggles over policy and power. What is different in 2025 is that Democrats are more willing to deploy the same tactics that Republicans have embraced for decades, desperate to use any leverage they can find to stop a runaway imperial president.
The turning point came 30 years ago, when Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich led his party into a dramatic budget confrontation with Democratic President Bill Clinton. Two shutdowns in quick succession forced a compromise, but not before Gingrich established a dangerous precedent that permanently altered the rules of political combat.
The rise of shutdown politics was gradual, then sudden. It began as a slow burn but accelerated rapidly in the mid-1990s. A key turning point was the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, passed as legislators attempted to reassert control over federal spending in the wake of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Among the reforms, the law set deadlines for passing federal appropriations bills.
Starting soon after, brief funding gaps occurred over specific policy disputes. In 1976, for example, parts of the federal government closed when Republican President Gerald Ford and a Democratic Congress deadlocked over funding for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Between 1977 and 1981, Democratic President Jimmy Carter and the Democratic-controlled Congress failed to reach agreement several times, including on programs related to reproductive rights.
In Carter’s final year in office, Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued legal opinions in 1980 and 1981 that sharply limited the circumstances under which federal agencies could spend money without congressional appropriations. The rulings meant that nonessential federal employees would be furloughed, significantly amplifying the impact of any shutdown. Years later, Civiletti admitted that he couldn’t have imagined shutdowns that went on for more than a few days and “would be used as a political gambit.”
As intensifying partisan polarization led legislators to wrangle over appropriations bills until the last minute, government shutdowns became more frequent in the 1980s, culminating in 1990 with a standoff over President George H.W. Bush’s deficit reduction efforts. Yet they remained relatively brief, episodic, and issue-specific.
Most important, neither party viewed shutdowns as a legitimate political tactic but rather as a crisis to be resolved. When they occurred, lawmakers and executive branch officials worked around the clock to reopen government, and few perceived the stoppages to be acceptable.
That outlook faded in 1995 and 1996. At that time, Clinton was reeling—and the Republicans on Capitol Hill were riding high. In the 1994 midterms, the Republican Party captured the House and Senate for the first time since the 1952 elections. Gingrich, who had entered the House as a representative from Georgia in 1979 and served as the minority whip since 1989, was widely credited with nationalizing the midterm elections and crafting the strategy that ended four decades of Democratic dominance.
Under Gingrich’s leadership, Republicans framed the midterms as a referendum on Clinton, highlighting his 1993 tax increase, his failed 1994 health care proposal, and that year’s gun control legislation as proof that the allegedly centrist Democrat was in fact a traditional liberal who supported big government. Republicans had offered voters a 10-point plan, the “Contract With America,” that they could literally pin to their refrigerators as a reminder of the promises that Gingrich and his colleagues made.
Gingrich, who Time magazine named as its “Man of the Year” in 1995, dominated the national conversation. His bombastic rhetoric drew constant coverage as Republicans demanded sweeping spending cuts to shrink Washington and fulfill the legacy of President Ronald Reagan.
By the end of the year, Democrats and Republicans faced irreconcilable differences. House Republicans sent the president short gap spending bills and a short-term borrowing extension that Gingrich knew Clinton would not sign. Rather than straightforward spending, the Republican Party added to the Band-Aid legislation transformative policy changes aimed at achieving a balanced budget in seven years, including measures to prevent a scheduled drop in Medicare (Part B) premiums, $250 billion in regressive tax cuts, and a major rollback of environmental protections. The goal was to create a crisis that would force Clinton’s hand.
Under Gingrich’s leadership, House Republicans also abolished the “Gephardt rule,” a process Democrats had adopted in 1979 to ensure that the federal debt ceiling rose automatically when the budget required it. Restoring the need for a separate congressional vote, Gingrich warned Clinton that Republicans might refuse to approve an increase, thereby risking national financial default. Anything and everything was on the table.
“I don’t care what the price is,” Gingrich said. “I don’t care if we have no executive offices and no bonds for 60 days—not this time.”
Clinton, whose instinct was to compromise, believed that Gingrich’s demands were so extreme that they would dismantle what former Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson had had built. The price was too high, nor was this the way to deliberate over the matter. Clinton insisted on a clean funding bill.
Gingrich held firm: “We think all the president has to do is commit to a seven-year balanced budget with honest numbers and an honest scoring system.”
On Nov. 13, 1995, the continuing resolution funding the government expired at midnight after last-minute negotiations collapsed. Clinton vetoed the bill, and on Nov. 14, the government shut down.
More than 800,000 nonessential workers were sent home as national parks and other vital government services closed. Certain Social Security services were not being processed. Medical research froze. The effects were felt worldwide.
Gingrich suffered a self-inflicted political wound when he complained to reporters that Clinton had ignored him aboard Air Force One during their flight to and from Israel for the funeral of the slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The press portrayed Gingrich as stubborn and immature. The New York Daily News ran a front-page feature with the image of an infant under the headline “Cry Baby.” The rest of the headline read: “Newt’s tantrum: He closed down the government because Clinton made him sit at back of plane.”
On Nov. 18, 28 House Democrats staged a sit-in on the chamber floor demanding that the government reopen. “I’ve seen sit-ins to close a government down,” remarked West Virginia Democratic Rep. Bob Wise. “This is the first sit-in I’ve ever seen to keep a government open.”
The shutdown finally ended the next day, when Clinton and the Republicans agreed to a short-term funding bill.
But the partisan fissures did not disappear. “We have established a framework for negotiations; nothing will be agreed to until everything is agreed to,” declared the White House chief of staff, Leon Panetta.
Gingrich demanded that the president agree to measures that would balance the budget over seven years. In turn, Clinton warned that he would “still veto any bill that requires crippling cuts in Medicare, weakens the environment, reduces educational opportunity, or raises taxes on working families.”
When the temporary agreement ended on Dec. 15, the parties still lacked a long-term budget. Republicans sent Clinton a plan that retained the deep spending and tax cuts that his administration had rejected, and he vetoed it. The next day, the government shut down again. Roughly 300,000 workers went home. This time, it lasted for 21 days.
Although fewer federal employees were furloughed (because seven of 13 appropriations bills passed), key services were sharply curtailed once again, and many departments, including the Department of the Interior, closed their doors. Veterans’ benefits were cut down. Public health officials couldn’t track diseases. There were disruptions in processing H-1B applications for immigrant workers. In Washington, taxi drivers remained parked without fares while hotels and restaurants were forced to lay off staff. Right outside of Yosemite Park, according to the New York Times, 1,600 hospitality workers lost their jobs right as the holiday season was underway.
The standoff finally ended on Jan. 6, 1996, when Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, an older Midwestern conservative uninterested in Gingrich’s destructive brinksmanship as well as a 1996 presidential contender, pressed House Republicans to scale back their demands.
Panetta later recalled that Dole cautioned colleagues during an Oval Office meeting: “You know, you could shut the government down maybe one or two days, but you go beyond that, they come looking for you.”
Dole was right.
In both phases of the shutdown, Republicans saw public opinion turn against them. The strong position that they had enjoyed after the midterms evaporated as media coverage put a spotlight on the impact of the gridlock. Far from treating the shutdown as routine, the media presented it as abnormal and historic. The term “crisis” appeared much of the time. According to Pew, party approval ratings fell to 38 percent by August.
The damage that Republicans suffered left both parties scared of being held responsible for another shutdown.
But in 2010, a new Republican generation—the Tea Party—arrived in Washington riding a wave of anger about President Barack Obama. They were determined to slash government and erase the legacy of President George W. Bush’s “big-government conservatism.” Nor were they bound by the traditional norms of governing that insiders considered to be sacrosanct. In 2013, Republicans forced a 16-day shutdown—two years after they had seriously considered refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling, which once again threatened to send the country into financial default. There would be a series of partial shutdowns in 2018-2019.
Although Congress has often avoided closures by passing short-term funding measures at the very last minute, the threat of shutdowns has become a routine feature of national politics.
The precedent that the Republican Party set in 1995 and 1996, reopened by the Tea Party, has been one among the most damaging to a core governing norm: Congress and the president should resolve their budget differences without shutting down the government on which Americans depend. Recent history stands as a prime example of healthy, robust partisanship giving way to destructive hyperpartisanship.
While many of Trump’s critics rationally view the current moment in U.S. politics as a true democratic emergency, one that may justify temporarily accepting a government shutdown, over the long term, reform must move in the opposite direction. Congress needs to ensure that mechanisms are in place to make government shutdowns rare. The country must build a political arena where parties can wage their battles without endangering the public or creating a chronic uncertainty about whether essential services will function from one month to the next. Achieving governing stability is, in fact, a key part of the project of rooting out what Trumpism has done to U.S. politics.
As Democrats weigh their next moves to rein in this presidency and grow more willing to use hardball tactics that many party leaders have traditionally resisted, they must remain mindful of the damage they could inflict on the very institutions that their party values most—namely, a healthy, functional, and robust federal government.