NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {A} s the federal government creeps towards another shutdown, it’s tempting for fiscal conservatives to be a little giddy. Shutting down the government sounds like it could be a useful way to punish overreaching bureaucrats or cut spending. But government shutdowns don’t reflect the actual fiscal state of the country, and they don’t serve a good purpose. Congress can and should end them forever.
The logic behind a shutdown seems straightforward: Congress passes appropriations bills for a period of time, and when that period of time is up, the government no longer has any money. If the government doesn’t have any money, it has to shut down.
But the government has been out of money since 1835, the last year there was no federal debt. It’s standard operating procedure for the federal government to spend money it does not have. Yet on arbitrary dates on the calendar, this constant fact abruptly matters, and the government has to shut down.
The reason for government shutdowns is the Antideficiency Act, which says that government agencies can’t spend money that hasn’t been appropriated by Congress. So when the appropriations bills run out, bureaucrats can’t keep doing their jobs. That law is good and right. Congress controls government spending under the Constitution, and agencies should not be permitted to keep spending without appropriations.
The problem is that most members of Congress don’t face very strong incentives to pass new appropriations bills on time. If the punishment for failing to appropriate funds in a timely manner is a government shutdown, members from the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area will be very sensitive to it, but most others will not.
The bulk of federal employees who are affected by a shutdown live near Washington, and that’s essentially the only local economy in the country that is heavily dependent on federal employment. If you’re a congressman from Texas or Wyoming or Minnesota or just about anywhere else, there’s little immediate downside to your district from a government shutdown. So you can play up whatever national political narrative your party is pushing while most of your constituents hardly notice anything has changed.
Compare this with the incentives in systems with Westminster parliaments, where the failure to pass a supply bill to fund the government results in the prime minister’s immediate resignation, the dissolution of parliament, and a new election. If all members of Congress were at risk of quickly losing their jobs because of a government shutdown, they’d treat the situation much differently.
If the shutdown were a useful mechanism for policy reforms, it might be worth keeping around. The debt ceiling, for example, has provided opportunities for spending reforms in the past, often on a bipartisan basis. But shutdowns don’t, and they have been proven ineffective repeatedly. The government shuts down for a little while, Republicans get blamed for it, the shutdown ends, federal workers who missed a paycheck get back pay, and spending resumes as normal.
The way forward is obviously not to adopt a parliamentary form of government. There have been proposals in Congress over the years to better align incentives within our system to prevent pointless shutdowns. Senators James Lankford (R., Okla.) and Maggie Hassan (D., N.H.) have introduced a bill that would automatically pass two-week continuing resolutions that fund the government at the previous year’s levels and require members of Congress to stay in Washington until proper new appropriations bills are passed. Congress would be required by the bill to stay in session seven days a week and only work on appropriations until the process is complete.
Lankford’s argument to the Senate was that the federal government’s spending problems are extremely important but that the current system does not incentivize productive legislative debates. Forcing Congress to stay in session and only debate spending would be a step in the right direction. There’s no reason to punish federal employees and contractors every once in a while because Congress doesn’t do its job all year round. Lankford pointed out that the contractors who help the Border Patrol won’t get paid if the government shuts down at the end of the month, despite the ongoing upsurge in border crossings. And unlike employees, contractors generally don’t get back pay after a shutdown is over.
Over his career, former Republican senator Rob Portman introduced a proposal to end shutdowns several times. It would automatically approve funding at the previous year’s levels if Congress failed to pass appropriations bills on time. Then, at 90-day intervals after that, it would cut spending by 1 percent across the board. That would be sure to get Congress’s attention, and Portman’s idea had broad bipartisan support the last time he introduced it in 2019.
There might be some fear that these bills would be unconstitutional because they would let a past Congress determine future Congresses’ spending. But as Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out the last time there was a shutdown brewing, the point of the constitutional provision is to prevent spending without authorization by Congress, and a law that specifies what happens if appropriations bills don’t get passed provides sufficient authorization. Social Security spending was authorized by previous Congresses, and it keeps on going (and going and going).
Shutdowns are exercises in political and fiscal futility. They’re unnecessary, and Congress should end them forever. A combination of Portman’s automatic cuts with the Lankford–Hassan bill would be a good way to better align incentives to get Congress to act on time and with regularity.