The United States government shut down at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday after Republicans and Democrats failed to reach an agreement to extend federal funding. This marks the 15th government shutdown in the United States since 1980, and the fourth under U.S. President Donald Trump—who was also in office during the longest shutdown in the country’s history, which began in 2018 and lasted 35 days.
The latest shutdown is largely a product of the bitter partisan divide and dysfunction consuming Congress, Washington, and the federal government more broadly, but it’s also a result of characteristics that are unique to the U.S. political system.
From a global perspective, America’s democracy is “highly unusual,” Andrew O’Donohue, a political scientist at Harvard University, told Foreign Policy. “U.S. democracy routinely struggles to accomplish basic tasks of governance like averting government shutdowns.”
Governments around the world collapse or fail for an array of reasons, from coups and invasions to protests and political disagreements. But shutdowns like those in the United States—in which much of the federal government effectively hits the pause button due to partisan gridlock and budget deadlines—are not common in other countries because their political systems or constitutions prevent such circumstances from arising.
In parliamentary systems, common in democracies worldwide, when governments fail to pass budgets, it often leads to no-confidence votes or resignations and triggers new elections. But when this happens, government services usually still continue.
So what makes the United States so unusual? The answer has to do with how the U.S. government is set up.
“Shutdowns are a function of the U.S.’s separation of powers system and the way Congress has historically used time-limited appropriations as a check on the executive branch,” said Zachary Price, a professor at the University of California College of Law San Francisco.
The system of checks and balances laid out in the U.S. Constitution was designed to prevent any of the three branches of government from becoming too powerful. The structure of the U.S. political system also means that the two major parties can control different branches of the government at the same time (in parliamentary systems, the legislative and executive branches are both controlled by the majority party or a coalition).
In theory, this structure was meant to help foster dialogue and cooperation between competing political parties with diverging views and goals. But as the current shutdown shows, this was perhaps wishful thinking from the Founding Fathers, and the reality has often been far different. History shows that political rivalries have frequently stood in the way of the legislative process or brought the U.S. government to a standstill.
“Government shutdowns are driven by the interaction of two factors in the United States: the sharp rise of political polarization and the design of our political institutions. The institutional design of U.S. democracy is uniquely ill-prepared to pass legislation or accomplish basic tasks of governance under conditions of severe polarization. That’s because passing legislation requires support from both houses of Congress and a supermajority in the Senate,” O’Donohue said.
The Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, or authority over taxation and spending. Every year, Congress is supposed to pass 12 appropriations bills that fund the government by Oct. 1 (the beginning of a new fiscal year for the government). Congress can pass stopgap measures, or continuing resolutions, to temporarily keep funding the government at current levels if it’s not able to hit the deadline. Stopgap budgets have become increasingly common over the past several decades.
The Republican-controlled House recently passed a stopgap measure, but the resolution failed to make it through the Senate. Republicans in the upper chamber also blocked a Democratic bill to temporarily fund the government that included provisions addressing the minority party’s concerns over health care.
Even when one party controls multiple branches of government, which is the case for Republicans at present, it doesn’t guarantee that the process will be smoother. Though Republicans control both chambers of Congress, they have a slim majority in the Senate with 53 seats and need support from Democratic senators to reach the 60-vote threshold necessary to move legislation forward.
“When the parties are bitterly divided, as they are in the United States today, it is very difficult to achieve the supermajority needed in the Senate to pass laws and keep the lights on in government,” O’Donohue said.
Government shutdowns in the United States are also a product of the Antideficiency Act of 1884, which prevents the obligation or expenditure of federal funds without congressional approval, and a narrow interpretation of the law issued by then-Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti under the Carter administration in 1980.
Prior to 1980, federal agencies largely continued operations even when there were funding gaps. But Civiletti helped change that and laid the foundations for the type of government shutdown we’re seeing today. Under his interpretation of the Antideficiency Act, government agencies are required to stop operations until Congress signs off on more funding—though there are exceptions for functions necessary for the “safety of human life or the protection of property.”
“It is my opinion that, during periods of ‘lapsed appropriations,’ no funds may be expended except as necessary to bring about the orderly termination of an agency’s functions, and that the obligation or expenditure of funds for any purpose not otherwise authorized by law would be a violation of the Antideficiency Act,” Civiletti wrote in April 1980.
Civiletti’s opinion paved the way for the government shutdowns the country has seen in the time since—a fact he struggled to wrap his head around years later.
“I couldn’t have ever imagined these shutdowns would last this long of a time and would be used as a political gambit,” Civiletti, who died in 2022, told the Washington Post in 2019. He added that his opinion was “a purely direct opinion on a fairly narrow subject and has been used in ways that were not imagined at the time.”
While government shutdowns are nothing new in the U.S., they still have rippling consequences that could impact millions of Americans. Some services will now be temporarily suspended—and federal employees will go without pay until an agreement is reached and funding resumes. Federal employees who are considered essential are still expected to continue showing up for work, while thousands of others are now indefinitely furloughed.