How Government Shutdowns Work, Part The Millionth
By 
Once upon a time, in the long, long ago, the Congress of the United States of America prepared a budget for the country in the spring and voted on it in the summer. The budget went into effect on the first of October, the start of the fiscal year. That was all we heard of budgets until the new year, when there would be arguments on what the budget should be.
(In an even longer ago, all this was done so that the fiscal year began in July. But one year that didn’t happen, and the fiscal year was moved to October. That was the start of the troubles.)
The budget for the whole United States government is big and hard to prepare. Once in the long, long ago, there were many gentlemen’s agreements, and the budget did not need to be so detailed, but one agency misspent and then another, and Congress decided that they must put many expenditures into law. So the budget document became bigger. And the amounts of money and numbers of agencies increased.
On top of these difficulties, a person in Congress named Newt Gingrich who was more inclined to peacocking than hard work got the idea that the preferences of a minority could be imposed on the budget if the minority could block passage of the budget and shut it down. Thus began a new way to govern. Or not.
In the olden times, the budget for fiscal year 2024-2025 would have passed in June 2024. But creative Republicans enlarged and elaborated on the Newt’s brilliance to engineer stops and starts. Continuing resolutions, they were called. Congress, under Republicans, has managed not to pass a real budget for an entire fiscal year!
Continuing resolutions say “Spend the same amount of money you spent last year.” My experience with that was in the environmental remediation program of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The nature of environmental remediation is that you spend some money to investigate what needs to be done at a site, and then you spend a lot of money on the remediation. There were several of us project leaders, each working on a different part of the Lab.
In a program like that, you have feast or famine. If you are allowed to spend only what you spent on the investigation, you can’t do the remediation. If you did a remediation last year, you probably won’t be able to spend all the money in a continuing resolution this year. And that means that the overall program may have less money next year.
Lab management worked the budget so that the program could continue in a reasonable way, but Congress’s insistence on defining programs in detail meant that they were probably breaking the law. Great bunch of choices!
As a contractor, the Lab was one step removed from the worst effects – furloughs and layoffs, which others are documenting. But they were possible when continuing resolutions continued for too long.
The Republican penchant for sabotage by budget is damaging the country in many ways. Stopping and starting programs, the added figuring and maneuvers to keep an entity like Los Alamos going, all add costs to normal operations. The added work and costs just to maintain operating programs damage morale.
This year, the DOGE and Russell Vought rampage through the government have multiplied the effects.
If the Democrats can get a trifecta, one of the best things they could do would be to pass a full budget in June, and make a big deal of it. The will of the people prevails! No Republican shutdowns! No thinking about the national budget until next year! Programs and people continue! Money saved!
Let it be so.