The US government shutdown is officially over.
The House narrowly passed a legislative package that would open the government, which President Donald Trump signed shortly after.
The shutdown ends with Democrats having failed to achieve their central goal. For weeks, the party refused to open the government unless expiring Covid-era Affordable Care Act tax credits were extended. Republicans countered that they would not negotiate on the credits with the government closed.
The Senate Democrats who gave up on that demand – infuriating the Democratic base – said they came to the conclusion that the only hope of extending the credits was to reopen the government and return to business as usual.
“As long as the government’s shut down, the clear statement from [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune and the Republican majority – and they control the House, the Senate and the White House – was we will not talk about health care with you,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire), one of the lead Democratic negotiators who voted to end the shutdown, said this week. “So there was no vote that we were going to get on the Affordable Care Act premium tax credits.”
Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat who opposed the shutdown from the beginning, gave a scathing assessment of how the shutdown went for Democrats: “This was a failure.”
This raises the question: Do shutdowns work?
“No,” said Representative Marcy Kaptur, an appropriator who has served in Congress since 1983 and seen every major shutdown of modern times. “I have served in many Congresses where we didn’t shut anything down, where we witnessed the normal process: amendments in committees. We made friends on both sides of the aisle. That’s how you get things done.”
None of the three major (we’re defining “major” as more than six days) shutdowns before this year accomplished their central policy goal. The 35-day-long 2018-2019 shutdown stemmed from a dispute between Trump and Democrats on funding for a border wall. Trump never got the full funding, and agreed to reopen the Government anyway, leading to rage from his right flank.
The 2013 shutdown, which lasted more than two weeks, was instigated by hardline Republicans who tried to block federal funding for the Affordable Care Act. The funding went ahead anyway, and Republicans – who were divided on the tactic – were left with the blame.
Republicans failed to secure the substantial spending cuts they sought during the 1995 shutdown, which, at the time, was the longest in American history. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole dubbed the impasse “a little ridiculous” and President Bill Clinton capitalised on the public frustration with the shutdown in the following year’s elections, winning comfortably.
This spotty track record has led to party leadership on both sides often avoiding the tactic, even when the alternative would be politically unpalatable.
In 2013, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was dismissive of the shutdown, saying it was “not conservative policy”.
In 2023, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy worked with Democrats to keep the Government funded, angering ultraconservative members who demanded steeper spending cuts. The move instigated a right-wing revolt that led to his ouster, but McCarthy defended his decision, saying at the time that shutdowns do not win politically.
And Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer voted with Republicans in the spring to keep the government open, prompting the ire of more left-leaning Democrats. He said at the time that shutting down the government would give “carte blanche” to the Trump White House to gut the federal government.
Most Democrats, particularly in the House, assert that this shutdown at least succeeded in bringing attention to the ballooning costs of health care, even if the bill to open the government did not include extensions to the ACA tax credits.
“If you ask us if the shutdown was worth it, I say, hell yes, it was worth it,” Representative Shomari Figures said. “Because fighting to maintain health care for American people, there’s nothing more pure than that.”
Shaheen, who was one of the original authors of the tax credits, said the fight to extend the subsidies would continue. She said she plans to hold Thune to his commitment of having a vote on the issue next month and would entertain shutting the government down again if he does not.
Representative Lloyd Doggett, who has served in Congress since 1995 and recalled the shutdown that year, said it’s not unusual for the party driving a shutdown to eke out some small concessions. In 95, he said Republicans walked away with modest funding cuts, and he noted that Trump got roughly US$1.4 billion in funding for border fortifications in 2019, though far from the more than US$5b he demanded.
Doggett said he felt Democrats could have secured a legislative win on the Affordable Care Act if they had held the line on the shutdown, especially since several Republicans had expressed support for extending the tax credits once the shutdown was over.
“Government shutdowns are to be avoided, to be only a last resort,” Doggett said. “It’s not a tool that I would use regularly, but nor do I think it can be removed from the toolkit.”
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