Is the government shut down?

What a shutdown actually is

The federal government spends money only when Congress has passed, and the President has signed, a law appropriating it. Most of that authority runs for one fiscal year, ending 30 September. When the new year begins without those laws in place, the authority to spend simply stops.

The Antideficiency Act makes it a legal prohibition rather than a policy choice: an agency may not spend money, or accept volunteer labour, in the absence of an appropriation. A shutdown is therefore not a decision to close anything. It is the automatic consequence of a deadline passing without a law.

Congress usually avoids this with a continuing resolution — a short law extending the previous year's funding to a new date. That is why funding deadlines arrive several times a year rather than once.

What keeps running

Considerably more than most coverage implies. Programmes that do not depend on annual appropriations are unaffected: mandatory spending such as Social Security and Medicare continues, because the laws creating those benefits carry their own spending authority. The Postal Service funds itself. Interest on the national debt is paid.

Work necessary to protect life or property also continues, performed by employees who are required to work through the lapse. Air traffic control, federal law enforcement, the military and hospital care fall into this category.

What stops is the discretionary remainder: passport and visa processing, national parks and museums, federal research, routine inspections, permit approvals, and most of the statistical agencies — which is why economic data releases can go missing during one.

What it costs

Employees who are furloughed, and those required to work without pay during the lapse, receive back pay once appropriations are enacted. That makes a shutdown an expensive way to spend nothing: the payroll is eventually paid in full, and the work that would have been done during it is not recovered.

The costs that do not come back are the disruption to people who depend on the paused services, contractors who are generally not made whole, and the administrative expense of stopping and restarting.

How one ends

Only one way: appropriations are enacted. Either the full-year bills pass, or a continuing resolution extends funding to a new date. There is no clock that runs out and no mechanism by which a shutdown resolves itself.

A note on what this page will not tell you

This page states the funding position and the date it was checked. It does not say whose fault a lapse is, whose offer was reasonable, or what anyone should do about it. Those are the questions most coverage is about, and they are not the questions this publication answers. If you want the arithmetic and the statute, that is what is here.