Who Shuts Down the Government?

Last updated 2 days ago. Our resources are updated regularly but please keep in mind that links, programs, policies, and contact information do change.

In a fermenting tank in Washington, D.C., a pale ale called The Precious One sat waiting. Atlas had already brewed it. What Atlas Brew Works lacked was federal approval of the label, because a 34-day shutdown had frozen the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau’s Certificate of Label Approval process. A perishable beer will not wait out a budget fight.

Atlas sued, arguing the frozen process had turned a licensing rule into an outright ban. Once appropriations were restored the claim went moot, and that finding divested the court of jurisdiction. Nobody at the Bureau had decided to stop approving beer labels.

A shutdown is not an order anyone gives. It is a prohibition that switches itself on: when an appropriation expires, a law called the Antideficiency Act forbids federal officials from spending money Congress has not provided, so the work stops by law rather than by anyone’s decision. Which is why the fight over blame is really a fight over who let the clock run out.

The sentence that makes carrying on illegal

The rule sits in title 31 of the U.S. Code, section 1341, and it is aimed at officials, not at the public. No officer or employee may make or authorize an expenditure or obligation exceeding an amount available in an appropriation, or commit the government to pay money before an appropriation is made unless authorized by law.

The second half is the half people miss. Ordering supplies, signing a contract, or letting an employee work a shift all create a promise to pay.

Section 1342 closes the obvious escape hatch. An official may not accept voluntary services, except for emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property. You cannot ask people to work for free and settle up later.

Why not keep going and pay when Congress agrees? Because the Comptroller General concluded in 1980 that working in anticipation of later ratification would itself violate the voluntary services bar. In that view, the only way an agency head avoids violating the Act is to suspend the operations of the agency.

None of this is how it always worked. Before 1980 a lapse had consequences, but agencies did not read the Act as ordering them to stop. The Office of Management and Budget told them to avoid hiring, grantmaking, nonemergency travel and otherwise let people keep working, running up a bill the government would owe with no appropriation behind it.

Two opinions in one year ended that.

On April 25, 1980, Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti wrote to the President, answering a question nobody had put to the Justice Department as law before: may an agency let employees keep working after its appropriation expires?

His answer turned on purpose. “The manifest purpose of the Antideficiency Act is to insure that Congress will determine for what purpose the government’s money is to be spent and how much for each purpose.”

Why the deadline is always September 30

Budget authority in the regular appropriations acts expires at the end of the fiscal year, on September 30. Congress has not typically finished those bills by then, so it uses one or more continuing appropriations acts for interim funding. If neither covers an activity, a funding gap opens.

How often does Congress finish in time? Since FY1977, all the regular bills have been enacted before the start of the fiscal year, four times. The most recent was FY1997.

So missing the deadline is the norm, not the emergency. The emergency is failing to cover the gap. Fifteen funding gaps occurred in the 19 fiscal years from FY1977 through FY1995, and FY2026 had three gaps covering a total of 120 days.

Not everything stops, and importance is not the test

What decides it is where the money comes from.

Programs funded by laws other than the annual appropriations acts keep going. Social Security is the clean case: the funds to pay beneficiaries are available automatically pursuant to permanent appropriations. The complication is people: those payments may be processed by employees paid from annual appropriations, whose salaries must then be treated as excepted.

Your passport runs on fees. The State Department is authorized to collect and spend consular fees instead of annual money, and expects passport services to remain 100 percent operational as long as there are sufficient fees.

Parks are stranger. The National Park Service keeps publicly accessible areas open and pays for a minimum out of retained recreation fees: restrooms, trash collection, road maintenance, campgrounds, law enforcement, entrance gates. A park unit that is only buildings closes entirely.

Some things stop on a date you can circle. In 2013 Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki told the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee that veterans would not receive pension compensation as of November 1, nor education checks, nor vocational rehabilitation. “That is 3 million veterans,” he said, “but when you add surviving spouses and children, it is over 5 million individuals.”

Ordered to report, with no paycheck coming

Two words do the sorting, and they are not synonyms. Exempt work is still funded, out of multiyear money that has not lapsed. Excepted work has no money behind it and continues anyway, because the Act does not bar obligations necessary to continue the functions.

Everyone else goes into shutdown furlough: temporary non-duty, non-pay status.

Who decides which one you are? Not the President, and not Congress. Agency legal counsel, working with senior agency managers, determine which employees handle excepted and non-excepted functions.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is blunt about that line. Interpretations of the Act have varied from Administration to Administration, from shutdown to shutdown, and within a single shutdown. Witnesses at the FY1996 shutdown hearings called “nonessential” a misnomer and demeaning.

Troops are not outside this. Military pay comes from annual appropriations, so it stops when they lapse. The 2013 Pay Our Military Act fixed that once, but it carried a termination provision and is no longer in effect.

The missed payday is lawful. The back pay is guaranteed.

Since 2019 the repayment is written into statute. The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act, approved January 16, 2019, provides that furloughed and excepted employees be paid their standard rate at the earliest date possible after the lapse ends, regardless of scheduled pay dates.

Read that last clause slowly. You will be paid, you will not be paid on time, and the law says so out loud.

Then came the part almost nobody knows. Excepted employees led by Eleazar Avalos worked through the shutdown of December 22, 2018, to January 25, 2019, and missed three paydays. They sued under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires the minimum wage on the regular payday, and the Court of Federal Claims found they had made out a violation.

The Federal Circuit reversed. As a matter of law, it held, the government does not violate this obligation when it complies with the Antideficiency Act by withholding payment during a lapse. Judge Hughes wrote for the court; Judge Reyna dissented.

Rent is still due on the first

A furloughed federal employee may be eligible for Unemployment Compensation for Federal Employees. Your claim is decided under the law of the state where your official workplace sits, and furloughed workers are generally treated as laid off with an expectation of recall.

There is a catch. Because retroactive pay is now permanent law, unemployment paid during the lapse may be deemed an overpayment.

Borrowing from your own savings was blocked too, until it was not. The Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) tied loan eligibility to pay status, which excluded exactly the people who needed money. With roughly 800,000 Federal employees three weeks from being furloughed again, a rule effective February 5, 2019, let them request a loan without regard to pay status.

An outside job is allowed, conditionally. You are still a federal employee, so the ethics standards in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) at 5 CFR part 2635 keep applying, along with agency rules that sometimes forbid the work outright. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) says to ask your agency ethics official first.

The contractor at the next desk gets nothing

A stop-work order requires contractors to minimize the incurrence of costs to the government, which can force them to reassign employees, put them on unpaid leave, or terminate them. Any cost adjustment negotiated later runs to the company.

Antwanye Ford runs Enlightened, Inc., an information technology and cybersecurity contractor. He appeared before the Senate Small Business Committee on day 15 of a government shutdown, two days, the chair noted, from a possible signal to the world that the United States would not pay its bills.

Ford would not accept that the damage was small. “I know about the kids of the people that we had to lay off,” he said. “These are people that came to our corporate picnics. That is not a pinprick.”

Chair Mary Landrieu answered directly: “And nobody is going to reimburse you for this.”

What happens to the official who spends anyway

The Act has teeth on paper. An officer knowingly and willfully violating those bars shall be fined not more than $5,000, imprisoned for not more than 2 years, or both.

In practice the finding lands on the agency. After the 2018 and 2019 shutdown, National Park Service officials said the agency would “fully restore” the recreation fee account it keeps under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act (FLREA). On September 5, 2019, the Government Accountability Office found the Interior Department had violated the Antideficiency Act by obligating those fees.

The CRS brief names no official and records no discipline.

Two agencies, one shutdown, different numbers

Does closing the government save money? Mostly it moves it. CRS treats a shutdown as delaying, as opposed to cancelling, government spending, and if the lapse is brief the catch-up can land in the same quarter.

What never comes back is the private activity that never happened, which CRS says is often left out of the estimates.

They are not contradicting each other. One describes the size of the economy, the other how fast it grew.

Whose fault it is, depending on who you ask

Take each account at full strength.

Members who withhold votes on a funding bill are not breaking the system, by their own account. They are using the power the Constitution gives Congress and no one else. No money leaves the Treasury except by law, so the power of the purse must be exercised through the lawmaking process, which lets Congress set the terms of an appropriation or refuse it outright.

A vote withheld is that power working, not failing.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas held the Senate floor for 21 hours. He urged fellow Republicans not to vote with Majority Leader Harry Reid, because doing so meant “voting to allow the majority leader to fund Obamacare on a straight party line vote.”

Reid called the speech a big waste of time. The vote carried 100 to 0, Cruz voting yes.

The House had set the terms. On September 20, 2013, it passed a stopgap running to December 15 with language that would prohibit the use of any federal funds to carry out the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The Senate stripped it. The House proposed delaying the law instead, the Senate refused, and on October 1 the shutdown began.

One fact complicates the confrontation. CRS reported the ACA ran largely on mandatory and permanent appropriations, so a discretionary lapse would not have stopped it. The Health and Human Services contingency plan said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services “would continue large portions of ACA activities”.

The same logic runs the other way. When a deal came, Representative Ritchie Torres of New York voted no. “It’s not a deal,” he told Morning Edition. “It’s an unconditional surrender that abandons 24 million Americans who are about to see their premiums more than double.”

Appropriators tell it as a procedural failure instead. Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, spoke on the first morning of the October 2025 shutdown. The House had convened for less than five minutes, long enough for the Pledge of Allegiance, then adjourned without taking up business.

Notice what none of these accounts is. None is a claim that somebody ordered the government closed.

The bills that would switch off the cliff

An automatic continuing resolution takes the power out of the deadline. It would begin at the time that a funding gap occurred and pay until full-year appropriations or an ordinary stopgap were enacted. No vote is needed.

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin put his version to Weekend Edition Saturday: the Eliminate Shutdowns Act would establish 14-day rolling continuing appropriations for departments Congress had not funded. His claim for it was flat. You will never have another shutdown ever.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia came at it from the incentives. His Stop STUPIDITY Act would fund the government at existing levels, “so no win for either side”, leaving out the two parts Congress and the President would have to settle: the legislative branch and the Office of the White House.

Appropriators have the strongest objection, and it is not about money. The House Appropriations Committee, reporting on H.R. 853 in the 106th Congress, argued that under such a mechanism “inaction would favor the status quo” and stonewalling appropriations bills would become a legitimate strategy.

That is the trade. Remove the cliff and you remove the deadline, and a Congress with no deadline has less reason to finish the bills.

Meanwhile the paychecks in the Capitol keep clearing. Article I, Section 6 says Members shall receive a compensation to be ascertained by Law, and the 27th Amendment blocks any change until after the next election. Republican Mike Kennedy of Utah and Democrat Eugene Vindman of Virginia have each introduced bills to stop that pay during a shutdown.

Until one of those passes, nothing changes. The prohibition has no off switch, the fiscal year still ends on September 30, and somewhere an agency lawyer is already drafting the list of who reports on the first.