How Congress Can Stop The Next Government Shutdown Before It Starts
Key Findings
- There have been 15 government shutdowns since 1980.
- Government shutdowns cost the economy an estimated $15 Billion per week.
- Enacting automatic spending cuts while keeping government open prevents politician from using a shutdown as leverage.
- The budget reconciliation process can be used to stop future government shutdowns.
Background
There has been a catastrophic increase in federal spending in recent years.1 Discretionary spending, which is determined by annual appropriations from Congress, rose from $1.3 trillion in 2019 to $1.9 trillion in 2025—a 40 percent increase in just six years.2 While many factors contribute to the explosion in spending, one of them is the broken appropriations process.
Congress is supposed to pass 12 separate appropriations bills each year to fund most government programs and agencies.3 However, Congress has failed to pass all 12 bills on time since 1997.4 For nearly 30 years, the government has been funded through massive, comprehensive omnibus appropriations bills. These bills are often negotiated behind closed doors and released to members of Congress only a few days before government funding lapses.5 These pieces of legislation are thousands of pages long and are often used as vehicles for unrelated policy priorities.6
Shutdowns are used for political leverage
The appropriations process can be used to sneak unpopular policies and special pet projects into law due to the looming threat of triggering a government shutdown if the massive funding package fails to pass quickly.7
Since 1980, there have been 15 government shutdowns.8 Some of these shutdowns lasted for just a few days, while others went on for weeks.9
In November 2025, the longest government shutdown in history concluded.10 This 43-day shutdown began when the House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution that maintained appropriations at current levels beyond the end of the fiscal year.11 Democrats in the Senate blocked this appropriations bill in an attempt to force Congress to extend temporary, COVID-era ObamaCare subsidies that were plagued with fraud and abuse and were set to expire.12-13 Additionally, they demanded the repeal of the Rural Health Transformation Fund, and the repeal of new restrictions that prevent illegal aliens from accessing Medicaid or ObamaCare.14-15
In 2018, the second-longest shutdown was triggered under similar circumstances when some members of the Senate blocked passage of appropriations legislation because they were opposed to funds for border security.16
In February 2026, Senate Democrats once again demonstrated how the appropriations process can be abused to try and force through unpopular policies.17 For the first time in decades, Congress was set to pass individually negotiated appropriations bills.18 However, some members of the Senate blocked passage of the bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, triggering a partial shutdown.19 Agencies affected include Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol, the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, and the Transportation Security Administration.20
The use of government shutdowns as leverage to obtain preferred policy outcomes is costly to taxpayers and burdensome to American families and businesses and should be stopped.
Government shutdowns are expensive and disruptive to American families
Government shutdowns cost the economy billions that cannot be recovered once the shutdown ends.21 During the 2025 shutdown, the Department of the Treasury estimated that the cost to the economy was $15 billion per week, or $2 billion per day.22 The shutdown is estimated to have reduced fourth quarter gross domestic product by one percentage point, and delayed the collection of economic data, hampering efforts of the Federal Reserve to make decisions on interest rates and stymying business investment.23-24
Most federal employees are furloughed and not permitted to work during the duration of a shutdown.25 By law, these employees receive backpay for the time spent at home, costing the taxpayers $400 million each day. 26 Other federal employees don’t get a paid vacation but instead must report to work despite not receiving a paycheck until government funding is restored.27 These employees are often those on the front lines of ensuring public safety, including military service members, air traffic controllers, Transportation Security Administration officers, and federal law enforcement.28
The 2025 shutdown caused enormous disruptions beyond the federal workforce. An estimated 60,000 workers outside the federal government lost their job due to the economic impact of the shutdown.29 Tens of thousands of flights were delayed or cancelled, with cancellations reaching seven times the pre-shutdown average before the shutdown was lifted.30 The lapse in funds for the Small Business Administration hampered entrepreneurial efforts, with more than $5 billion in loans to more than 10,000 small businesses delayed.31 Processing for federally backed home loan programs at the Department of Agriculture, which help rural Americans purchase a home, was halted during the shutdown and now faces a backlog of applications.32
Government shutdowns are costly, wasteful, and have negative impacts on the lives of Americans. Congress should ensure that they do not happen in the future.
Congress can pass legislation to permanently end government shutdowns
Every time government appropriations lapse, there is an opportunity for some in Congress to hold the entire government hostage to accomplish their personal policy goals. Annual appropriations bills are supposed to provide the chance to debate the value and necessity of government spending, but the broken process simply incentivizes brinksmanship and backroom deals to avoid a costly and politically deleterious shutdown.
Congress should remove these perverse incentives by passing legislation to ensure that the government continues to operate in the event of a lapse in appropriations. This legislation should extend temporary budget authority automatically for an agency if an annual funding bill for that agency has not been passed. This ensures that there will not be a shutdown of either the full government or any individual agency, and government operations can continue uninterrupted.
To provide an incentive to negotiate and pass an appropriations bill, there should be an automatic reduction in budget authority in the event that an appropriations bill for an agency has not been enacted. This creates pressure to negotiate and rewards Congress for passing funding legislation on time. This automatic spending cut should be enforced through sequestration, and the administration should be given latitude to enact cuts on grants, programs, or personnel instead of requiring across-the-board spending cuts that may hurt taxpayers or impact important government functions such as military readiness.
Budget reconciliation can be used to prevent future government shutdowns
If Democrats in Congress are unwilling to end the threat of government shutdowns, Republicans can use the budget reconciliation process to pass legislation that would enact automatic spending cuts if appropriations bills are not passed on time while maintaining government operations.
The budget reconciliation process allows bills to pass the Senate with a simple majority vote as opposed to being subject to the usual 60-vote threshold.33 The Byrd rule is a set of parameters that are supposed to ensure that only budgetary provisions can be included in a reconciliation bill.34 Under the Byrd rule, a provision cannot be passed via reconciliation if it fails to change revenues or outlays, changes revenues or outlays beyond the reconciliation instructions, produces changes to outlays or revenue that are merely incidental to the non-budgetary aspects of the provision, or amends the Social Security program.35
The process for determining which provisions qualify for inclusion in a reconciliation bill involves members of majority and minority party leadership meeting with the Senate Parliamentarian, who hears arguments and renders an advisory opinion.36
The Byrd rule does not make a distinction between mandatory and discretionary outlays, and in the past, reconciliation has been used to change discretionary spending.37 In the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, discretionary spending caps were set through fiscal year 1995 and enforced through sequestration.38 In 1993, the reconciliation process was used to extend discretionary spending caps through 1998. In both instances, there was unanimous agreement in the Senate that these provisions impacting discretionary spending were allowed under the Byrd rule, as no point of order was raised against the provisions.
The precedent set by previous reconciliation bills, and which provisions were deemed acceptable in the past is an important component of the process of determining if a provision meets Byrd rule criteria or not.39 Therefore, a provision to automatically enact spending caps and sequestration in the event of a lapse in appropriations should be eligible for inclusion in reconciliation. In the 1990s, the enforcement of spending caps was triggered by Congress hitting spending targets.40 In this provision, spending cuts would be triggered by a lapse in appropriations. In both cases, enforcement of limits on discretionary spending are triggered by events that may occur during the budget process within the budget window.
One of the central goals of the Byrd rule is deficit reduction. An automatic cut in discretionary spending in the event of a lapse in appropriations meets the requirements of the Byrd rule because this would reduce outlays and the deficit.41
Additionally, some falsely claim that the reconciliation process can only be used to impact mandatory spending and not discretionary spending. While this has been proven untrue by precedent, automatically continuing funding in the absence of appropriations would temporarily mandate funding by statute— essentially rendering all government funding mandatory spending on a temporary basis, until appropriations bills are passed.
A provision to automatically extend discretionary spending at reduced levels in the event of a lapse in appropriations should pass the requirements of the Byrd rule and be included in budget reconciliation.
The Bottom Line:
Congress should use reconciliation to prevent future government shutdowns and ensure fiscal discipline for years to come.
The appropriations process has been broken for decades. Rather than debating and passing individual spending bills, Congress has consistently used continuing resolutions and omnibus spending packages to keep the government operational. The threat of a government shutdown leads to backroom dealing and hasty votes to pass enormous spending packages that members of Congress barely have time to read, much less debate.
Legislation to provide for automatic continuation of government funding would prevent costly and
harmful government shutdowns and remove the threat of a shutdown as a political tool. Including
automatic spending reductions would incentivize Congress to pass appropriations bills on time.
This legislation would reduce the deficit by preventing costly shutdowns, and Congress should use
the budget reconciliation process to end the specter of government shutdowns once and for all.
