The Federal Trade Commission Building is among those that were closed Wednesday. Photo / Salwan Georges, The Washington Post
Shutdowns are a familiar autumn rite of dysfunctional government. But the current one in the US is different from any that have come before. That makes it a harder test of both sides’ resolve and discipline.
President Donald Trump is revelling in a legally shaky plan to employ the shutdown to punish his enemies – or more accurately, their constituents.
The administration has put a halt on tens of billions of federal dollars that are going to blue states, including roughly US$18 billion ($30.9b) for New York’s subway and Hudson Tunnel projects. Not coincidentally, those are in the hometown of the Democratic leaders of the US House and Senate.
And instead of furloughing federal employees and giving them back pay when the government reopens, as has happened in past shutdowns, Trump is threatening to fire them and gut entire agencies.
As much as the White House is trying to blame this on Democrats, who have refused to give Republicans the eight votes they need in the Senate to reopen the Government, a survey by The Washington Post showed that a large plurality of Americans are holding Trump and the Republicans responsible.
Nearly three-quarters support the Democrats in their central demand that subsidies lowering the cost for health coverage purchased under the Affordable Care Act should be extended, rather than expiring as scheduled at the end of the year.
Strikingly, where Trump claimed during last year’s campaign that he had “nothing to do” with Project 2025 – a 900-plus-page plan to remake the federal government put together by many of his hard-right allies, including current budget director Russell Vought – he now embraces it as his strategy.
“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump wrote Thursday on his Truth Social platform. “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”
In the meantime, he has been gleefully trolling the opposition, spreading deepfake videos that include one portraying Vought as the grim reaper. Another depicts House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (a Democrat), who is black, in a moustache and sombrero. The racist imagery promotes a false Republican claim that Democratic lawmakers are trying to force the government to offer full health care benefits to undocumented immigrants.
Past shutdowns, as traumatic as they were, rarely ended up having much long-term impact on the economy. But that is also where this one could be different, given Trump’s stated goal of using it to permanently slash the government workforce at a time when the job market already appears to be softening.
It is worth noting that none of this would be happening if Congress had done its job and funded the government before the new fiscal year. However, for the second year in a row, that deadline went by without one of the dozen regular appropriations bills being passed.
The Republican endgame, says former House speaker Newt Gingrich, is one that Vought spent four years planning while Trump was out of office.
“They really do see this as an opportunity,” Gingrich said in an interview. “And if he has his way, Russ will have eliminated more jobs than Elon Musk and DOGE,” referring to the billionaire and his chaotic operation deemed the Department of Government Efficiency, which has fallen well short of its goals for cutting spending and streamlining how the government operates. Musk departed the administration in May.
The back-to-back shutdowns Gingrich engineered in late 1995 and early 1996 are the closest thing to a template for what is happening now – and they should be an object lesson for Republicans heading into the 2026 midterms.
With the GOP having won the House for the first time in four decades, Gingrich was at the height of his power in June 1995, when he told me in an interview that a year-end shutdown would be the “heart of the revolution”.
The speaker planned to leave President Bill Clinton with a choice: “He can run the parts of government that are left, or he can run no government. Which of the two of us do you think worries more about the government not showing up?”
Then, as now, much of the dispute centred on health care. Republicans wanted to raise Medicare premiums, curb other parts of the programme and cut social spending, in part to pay for tax cuts.
Even Clinton believed, as he later recalled in his memoir, that the standoff initially “seemed likely to doom my presidency”. But, he wrote, he was “ready to see it through to the end”.
“I didn’t want to be President if the price of doing so was meaner streets, weaker health care, fewer educational opportunities, dirtier air, and more poverty,” Clinton added. “I was betting that the American people didn’t want those things either.”
Gingrich lost control of the narrative after he confessed at a breakfast with reporters that his intransigence was also fuelled by pique over the fact that he had been seated at the back of Air Force One on an overseas trip and had been forced to exit by the rear stairs.
Making the comment was, Gingrich acknowledged last week, “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done”. The cover of the New York Daily News depicted Gingrich as a wailing infant in a diaper under the headline “CRY BABY”. But it took another seven weeks of on-again-off-again shutdowns before Republicans buckled and struck a deal to reopen the Government.
The whole saga is now regarded as having boosted Clinton’s reelection prospects – something that seemed improbable when it began. It also, as Gingrich noted, put the country on a path to a balanced budget, something for which both parties could take credit.
Granted, these are different times, with a different media environment. The country is far more polarised than it was three decades ago, and the Democrats are operating in a situation where they have limited institutional leverage. But what held then may also be the case now, especially if the shutdown drags on as it appears likely to do: victory goes to the side that remains focused, clear about its goals and disciplined.
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