September 7, 2025
The United States government shut down is scheduled in just a few days. And Congress – the people responsible for stopping it– you guessed it – meh.
I think that’s the exact scientific term for it. Meh…
What the hell is going on here?
Ok. So the first thing we need to do is talk about the timing. Tomorrow is September 8. The house and Senate are in session. The government is scheduled to shut down on September 30th. So you’re thinking – oh Lisa – they’ve got four weeks to figure it out. Well – according to this calendar you’d be right – but you’re not looking at the right calendar. According to the House and Senate’s recess calendar, both chambers are scheduled to be on recess for the entire week of September 21st and they usually leave on this Friday before oh – and the House is out this Friday – September 12th. So basically when you add the available working days — congress has 10 days to figure this out.
And let me be clear – right now – there is no deal. We’re not even in the ballpark of a deal. As I have reported for years – the reason why it feels like we always have these threats of a government shutdown is because congress won’t do its job. It’s a simple as that. The one and only job that congress has is to make sure the United States government is functioning. And they have to do that by passing what are called appropriations bills – or funding bills that allocate all the money that each federal department and agency gets. They have to pass 12 of those. And they have to pass all 12 by September 30th every single year. This is not a surprise. It’s literally been the exact same day every single year for 50 years. And if they don’t pass all 12 by September 30th – the government shuts down. Except it seems the recent policy of congress is not pass any of those bills – forget about passing them on time and instead – they kick the can down the road by passing what’s called a continuing resolution. Or a CR. CR’s just keep all the government funding status quo for a short period of time so congress can get its act together and pass those appropriation bills. But every time a CR is passed it sets up another government shutdown date. So you feel like this happens all the time because congress passes multiple CRs every year giving us multiple shutdown deadlines –because they continually fail to accomplish their most basic function.
Traditionally Republicans hate CRs. In fact when Mike Johnson became the Speaker he unequivocally said there will be no more CRs. But guess what – he’s passed several of them since he became speaker in 2023. And we’re probably going to get another CR in a few days too because there is literally no way that congress is going to be able to pass all the appropriations bills in just 10 days.
Neither the Democrats nor Republicans wants to be blamed for shutting the government down – and since the Republicans are in control of every piece of this government it’s on them to come up with a deal with democrats to keep the government open. Republicans cannot do this on their own – they cannot jam a CR through with only republican votes. Because CRs must have at least 60 votes in the Senate to pass. Republicans don’t have 60 Senators so that means they need to convince at least 7 Senate Democrats to also vote yes. And let me tell you something my friends after Democrats caved last time and got their ass handed to them by their base – they are *not* going to do that again unless they get something out of the deal. On top of that –Democrats are especially pissed off right now and not much in the negotiating mood because recently president trump has jammed through a recission package and is threatening another one. Remember all the funding was cut for NPR and PBS and USAID? That happened because Republicans jammed through Trump’s recission package. Yea – Democrats are like why are we negotiating any funding bills with these republicans and voting yes on these CRs and appropriations bills if trump is just going to come in and take away all the programs we like and our constituents like?
So what do these Democrats want? Well in order to get them to the table to avoid a government shutdown– Democrats have for months floated these grandiose ideas saying they want Republicans to agree to some kind of check on Trump’s power or they want funding restored to those programs trump cut out in those recissions packages. Those are pipe dreams. But there may be two options here. Option one – what’s called a clean CR. That means literally keep everything as it is and keep the government open until a certain date. No changes. Or two Republicans can dangle a carrot to Democrats that some moderate Republicans in vulnerable districts have also been asking for…. And that would be adding some kind of extension of the affordable care act subsidies to the CR. I told you in this video those are going away at the end of the year and that’s going to jack up health insurance costs for basically everyone next year unless congress does something about it. If Republicans offer an extension of those ACA subsidies in a CR – that could be something that would get Democrats on board and keep the government open.
I’ll keep you posted.
