What if the Government Closed Forever?
In 2018–19, we witnessed the startling willingness of our leaders to grind functioning government to a still-halt over partisan squabbling and political disagreements — but how new is this phenomenon — and will it happen again? Probably.
Published in
6 min readJan 29, 2019
In the modern era, the Government of the United States has been shutdown 21 times. In the last few years, we saw the federal government shuttered four times — most recently with the border wall saga — lasting the longest in American history at a whopping 35 days, closed.
Disagreements between Congress & the White House are not uncommon. What was uncommon was the extent to which these particular shutdowns affected the ability of the American government to function normally. They were much wider-spread than the others. Most government shutdowns in the last forty years have been partial shutdowns of only one or two agencies — never the whole damn thing.
