In This Story
The United States faces a government shutdown – again. How should we take care of it and what must be done to prevent it from happening at all? David Ramadan talks all about it with guest co-host Dr. Jeremy Mayer, a professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and guest Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. Together, they discuss the causes and consequences of government shutdowns, particularly their economic impact and negative effect on public trust. They also explore why a continuing resolution is way better than shutting down the government, the importance of reasserting congressional control over the federal budget, and “making appropriators great again.”
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Dealing With Yet Another Government Shutdown With Steve Ellis
We are recording this episode on October 3rd, 2025, in the middle of a federal government shutdown. Although this episode will not air until October 15, 2025, there is still a lot to be covered. My co-host is my colleague, Dr. Jeremy Mayer. Jerry is a Professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and Director of the Master's and PhD Program in Political Science. He has published on topics such as presidential politics, public opinion, ideology, and higher education. In this episode, he brings deep institutional knowledge of US political institutions and a scholarly perspective on the stresses that shutdowns place on governance.
Our guest is Steve Ellis. Steve is president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan federal budget watchdog that monitors government spending, debt, and fiscal policy. Mr. Ellis has testified before Congress, been a visible voice in media debates on federal spending, and consistently advocates for fiscal accountability. His perspective is grounded in practical concerns about the budget process, shutdown risks, and the impact on government functions. Welcome, gentlemen.
It is great to be with you.
Thanks for having me.
What Causes A Government Shutdown
Thank you. Jerry, why don't you lead us with perhaps an overall education on what causes a shutdown?
A shutdown is when the government fails to pass all or part of the federal budget, which is usually divided into thirteen component parts. They have to pass those bills by October 1st, or the parts that are unfunded legally have to shut down. A shutdown doesn't mean the government completely stops working. By law, activities that are vital to the preservation of life or government property have to continue. In some departments, that could be as much as 60% or 70% of the workforce, and others that might be 5%.
Ultimately, historically, everyone gets paid when the shutdown ends, but if it goes on long enough, people can be working a month or more and not getting a paycheck. That can be a stress on many family finances. Shutdowns usually end with a continuing resolution rather than a full budget. They end with the government agreeing to stay open for 3 or 4 more weeks while Congress tries to pass a bill that the president will sign, which will fund the government for the remainder of the year.
Thank you. Steve, you have quite a bit of experience with these. This is not the first shutdown that we have seen. We have seen one that lasted up to 34 days during President Trump's first term. Where do we go?
David, you're right. This isn't my 1st rodeo, and certainly not my 1st shutdown. I've been at Taxpayers for Common Sense since 1999. There have been several during that timeframe. Even before that, when I was an officer in the Coast Guard, I was in the issue of whether it was going to be an essential or accepted employee or not. I certainly had that experience on that end as well.
In these shutdowns, both sides are pretty dug in. You mentioned the one during President Trump's first tenure. It was 2, and 1 that was broken up. There, you had active cheerleaders for the shutdown and the Republican Party. That was part of the cause. Here, they seem to be mostly all on the same page about it being the Democrats' fault. Nobody is saying that we should shut down the government, with a little bit of an exception that I can get to later.
The Democrats are also saying that they should not be shut down. Both of them have their base with them, so at the very moment, they're both pretty entrenched. At some point, things are going to give. It's a question of exactly when, whether that's in a week, because I don't think it'll be any sooner than that, or in two weeks when this episode airs.
Jerry, I know you had a couple of thoughts and questions for Steve. Go ahead.
Why A Continuing Resolution Is Better Than A Shutdown
I'm curious. You’re someone from a nonpartisan group that has friends on both sides of the aisle and is rigidly non-polarized. That's one of the best things about your group. You don't engage in the personal attacks and the bitter politics of the day. Where do you see the blame game? Who is at fault for this shutdown in your view?
I'm certainly in the pucks on both of their houses’ camp, to some extent. This has been something that we've seen coming for a long time. You mentioned at the top jury about how there are thirteen spending bills, but not this time. We've been operating on a continuing resolution for the entire fiscal year 2025.
You should explain to our audience what a continuing resolution is. I know I tried, but I think you could probably say it more succinctly.
If those twelve bills are not completed in time before the beginning of the fiscal year, then whichever parts of the government don't have a spending bill will be affected. Sometimes, it looks weird. You have transportation, housing, and urban development in one bill. You have Veterans Affairs and Military construction in another one. You have this hodgepodge of agencies that are put together. I believe the FDA is in the USDA bill.
The parts that don't have a full-year appropriation, you'll enact a continuing resolution to cover them to keep them operating during that time period until it expires. What happened was that earlier in the fiscal year, there was a continuing resolution during the Biden administration, and then they passed another one that continued into the Trump administration, into March 2025. They still couldn't come to an agreement on what to do, so they passed a full-year continuing resolution until the end of the fiscal year, which was September 30th, 2025. That's the first time that the entire government has been operating under a continuing resolution.
The continuing resolution is limiting because you're dealing with what you passed last year. It's extending the spending that was done for fiscal year 2024 into 2025. There are what they call anomalies, and these are the adjustments that are made. For instance, in 2024, there was funding for the inauguration. In the continuing resolution, at least the one done in March 2025, they pulled that funding out because we didn't have to spend any money on building the grandstand and everything else, along with the inauguration. Those are the anomalies.
The point is that the entire government, including the Department of Defense, which is the one that it has not happened to before, is operating under a continuing resolution. That is very limiting as far as planning and executing. There's going to be waste. There are things that should have probably gotten more money in fiscal year 2025 than they did in 2024. They have less money in 2025. It's all the way across the board. It's a terrible way to run a government.
I couldn't agree more. What I tell my students is that a shutdown is like, in medical terminology, an induced coma. You're taking the government, and you're saying, “We're going to do something that's bad for you, but we have to do it.” What I think of a continuing resolution is the government giving itself chemotherapy. It is bad for agencies to go through a CR for a month, let alone an entire year, because all of your planning and all the negotiations you went back and forth with your authorizing committee, your appropriation committee, and OMB, all of that's out the window. You did all that work and all those plans, but it's not going to happen.
You're going to try and do this year on last year's budget, which is a dumb way to run anything. You wouldn't do this to your family, let alone an agency of the federal government. We could debate about who's responsible for the shutdown, but for my money, it is a failure of the Republican Party under Trump, not even to attempt to budget. They said, “We don't care. We'll go with the CR, and then we'll get to something called the big beautiful bill.” That is not responsible budgeting.
Why The Republican Party Are Not Taking The Blame
Steve, the conventional wisdom used to be that the party in power takes the blame. Our friends in the Republican Party don't see it that way. They don't think they're going to take the blame. Any clue as to why they're thinking that?
You can look at a whole litany. I saw that come out of the White House. They say it's a clean CR. They’re like, “We're trying to do a clean CR.” A clean CR means that they didn't add any changes to it. That's their point. To Jerry's point, in the Senate, they don't have a 60-vote majority. They can't get past a filibuster, which is why even though they have a majority, they haven't been able to enact the CR. They have power in the White House. The public understands better than the Democrats that they're withholding their votes.
The other point in this, and I was going to get to this, too, is that all they need to do is pick up 5 or 6 Democratic votes in the Senate. They don't need to get the whole Democratic caucus to vote with them. They just need to pick up a few people. They've already picked up a couple. They lost 1 of their own, Senator Paul, but then picked up 3. There are some members who are retiring who wouldn't have any political blowback. It does seem to me that it's incumbent on the Republicans at some point to offer some sort of fig leaf. It doesn't have to be the whole healthcare plan extension that the Democrats are talking about. It can be something that, when it peels off enough, it gets the package through.
Tweet: It is incumbent on the Republicans to offer some sort of fig leaf to the Democrats during a government shutdown.
The Republicans have remarkable unity and a pretty good message on this, that it is this time the Democrats who want something substantive in return for opening the government. The longest shutdown in history, which we've already talked about, was Trump wanting his border wall. It was a small thing, but very politically charged.
The Democrats were like, “We agreed to fund this the year before. In return for something, you're offering us nothing. Forget it. We're not doing this unless you compromise.” This time, the Democrats are asking for about $1.3 trillion to $1.5 trillion in healthcare finance, along with some other goodies. That's a big ask for a four-week continuing resolution.
I agree with you. There has been remarkable unanimity among the Republicans, singing off the same song sheet with one exception. That is OMB Director Vought, who has been talking about using. As soon as you start saying, “I'm going to use the shutdown to accomplish some sort of policy goal,” particularly if it is to lay off our reduction of federal employees or change the whole budgeting circumstances, all of a sudden, it's not just about you wanting to pass a clean CR. Speaker Johnson has said this as well, that this is an opportunity to maybe shrink the government.
The Looming Threat Of Mass Layoffs During A Shutdown
That takes us to a new dimension in this particular shutdown. Even though the last big one was about a wall, now we're talking about firing people. We're talking about restructuring the federal government under the executive power while Congress is out because there's a government shutdown. How is that going to play?
It's part of a pattern. If you look at the last couple of years of American politics, polarization has broken Congress. Congress can't even do the peristaltic functions of basic governance, let alone solve major national problems, which is what we used to look to them to do. We used to have a Congress that tackled big issues. They can't even keep the lights on. In that growing failure of an entire institution, executive power has grown. It almost has to.
We get Trump and his OMB going, “This department will be fired 30%. In that department, we shut 50%,” which we've already seen a bit of already with AID, VOA, and the education department. If he does that even more broadly on steroids during the shutdown, we will have questions about why we have a Congress and what Congress is for. Their primary constitutional power is setting the budget. They have the power of the purse, and that's all diminishing.
That's the educational point of view. Steve, what's the practical point of view?
I have to agree with Jerry. One thing is to make appropriators great again.
You read it here first, folks. Make appropriators great again.
Congress needs to reassert its control over the power of the person. Let's face it. OMB Director Vought and President Trump are itching for a fight. One of the things that will happen is that if you do dismiss employees during this timeframe, that's understandable because they're not appropriated anyway. There's no money behind them. We're doing all this on credit, if you would, during this time of the shutdown.
As soon as the CR passes, all of a sudden, there's money appropriated for those FTEs or those Full-Time Equivalent people that are appropriated funds. If the executive is not spending it, then they're impounding those funds by extension, which is going to create tension there. That, under the 1974 Budget Reform and Impoundment Control Act, is illegal. Director Vought thinks that the law is unconstitutional, which was passed over President Nixon's veto. He's not the only person who has that opinion. That's going to come to loggerheads.
We're already there. If you look at what's going to land in the Supreme Court, the cuts at AID, the cuts at education, and the cuts at VOA were similar impoundments in a way of saying, “You told us to spend this money. Screw you, Congress. We are spending it.” If he does a mass firing during the shutdown, that may already be declared illegal.
Why A Government Shutdown Does Not Save Us Any Money
Steve, I'm teaching a Virginia elections course this semester. One of my students asked me, “Does the shutdown save us money?”
No, it doesn't save us any.
Explain why.
What happens, and Jerry alluded to this earlier, is that we told all these employees to stay home. They can't even volunteer their time if they wanted to. They can't open their laptops. They can't answer their phones. They cannot work. All of a sudden, we have this lost work for a few days, but it could be longer than that. In the first Trump administration, it was 35 days that employees weren't doing their job, not because they didn't want to, but because they couldn't. We pay them for all of that. There was a law passed in 2019 that required that. We're going to be paying these people for work that wasn't done.
The other point is that there's an economic cost. All those employees buy coffee, go out to lunch, and use their paycheck to do things that are economically important. It's an important thing for your audience to know that more than 80% of the federal workforce isn't in the DC area. It's out all across, so it's going to impact people where you're not even thinking about it. It's not just a Washington problem. It's a national problem. With what we've seen in previous shutdowns, if we go back to 2013, it was about $1.5 billion a day hit on the economy.
Tweet: More than 80% of the federal workforce is not in the DC area, but all across the country. A government shutdown is not just a Washington problem but a national issue.
It does not save us money. The shutdown cost us money.
There's one other way in which it costs us money, and that is a loss of governmental efficiency. That's the chemotherapy I talked about. The federal government is a workplace. Morale goes down, initiatives fester, and they do less good work in the aftermath of a shutdown. The problems get bigger during a shutdown.
I know the education field pretty well. There's a lot of government financing for things like science experiments. Sometimes, the researchers, by law, are told, “You cannot spend money from a federal grant during the shutdown,” which means your lab samples die. There are cancer patients who will not receive innovative therapies because they were being funded by the federal government.
How To Fix A Government Shutdown The Right Way
That’s interesting. We need to send a copy of this last segment that we covered in less than 60 seconds to probably half a dozen or half of the members of Congress, because I've heard about half a dozen of them on TV talking about how this is saving us money. Let's move out a little bit to how we fix this. Let's go for it. Let's assume that in ten days, this is over. By the time our audience is reading this, it was a 1-week or 10-day shutdown, and it's over. This is a consistent problem. You said earlier, Steve, that this is not your 1st rodeo or 1st shutdown. You said, “I’ve been here for 30-some years. I've seen dozens of these.” How do we fix this?
David, one thing is that it's interesting how we got into this mess in the first place. That was a decision by the attorney general at the beginning of the Reagan administration. We had shutdowns before, but everybody went to work. It wasn't really a shutdown. It was a lapse of funding. You continued to do your work. After a few days, the funding would happen, and everything would go merrily along. Under the attorney general, the decision was that no funding means no work. You have to go home. Only essential employees can continue to work. Here we are. That was in 1981 and 1982.
That’s a decision by my dear friend, Ed Meese.
I don't think it was Ed Meese.
He hadn't gotten confirmed yet. He had those ethical problems.
I see. There's this interpretation that has continued. It’s a cop-out, but I'm at the point where if it works, it works. Senator Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma, and Congressman Jodey Arrington, a Republican from Texas who's also the House Budget Chair, have a bill that we've supported that would 1) Require Congress to stay in town if there's the case of a shutdown, and 2) Have automatic CRS that would kick into place until a long-term CR or the actual appropriations bills are in place.
It is a release valve that removes some of the incentive for a shutdown. Sometimes, there have been instances where people want to have the shutdown to have that leverage point. Lawmakers want to have that leverage point. That would remove that because we're going to operate under a continuing resolution, which is wasteful, but it’s better than a shutdown.
Tweet: A continuing resolution may be wasteful, but it is better than a government shutdown.
Is there any traction for getting that out of Congress or out of committee?
It's two Republican lawmakers who are conservative. Hopefully, it has some legs, particularly if you have a shutdown and everybody looks at it as being wasteful and not a good idea. Since it is a good idea, maybe it doesn't have legs.
This is the first time I'm hearing of it. I think it will have legs. The Democrats would be fools not to get behind that 100%. Usually, in a shutdown or on the eve of a shutdown, it's a hostage situation with the Democrats caring a lot more about the hostage than the Republicans. That bill will remove the hostage situation to some extent.
CRs are bad, but they're not as bad as a shutdown. This would be good. The other thing we could do is go back to another interpretation. We could simply have the OLC, the Office of Legal Counsel, within the Justice Department issue a different interpretation. Unless the courts or Congress want to overrule that, that will become the rule of the day. That would be elegant as well.
The Impact Of A Government Shutdown On Public Trust
That’s interesting. We talked about what the shutdown is. We talked about whether it would cost or save us money. We talked about possible solutions. Let's take a big picture for a minute here. What is this doing to citizen trust in government?
It hurts it. The average citizen is not going to understand a lot of this terminology. They'll understand, though, that their family went on a vacation to Yellowstone and it was closed, or half of it was closed, or the bathrooms were not open. There's going to be stress on the TSA. What's going to happen with TSA is that those people will not be paid, and they'll be expected to work like air traffic controllers.
Those frontline federal workers are going to start seeing sickens. This has happened in prior shutdowns where the unions will say, “Everybody, start calling in sick in targeted ways.” Two weeks in, this will start to hurt the American people. The other thing is what Steve already suggested. The federal government is the largest employer in the country. If you suddenly disemploy that many millions of people, their families will stop spending money, and it can have a very large economic impact. The pain is going to be real.
Steve?
Jerry is exactly right in that it is this impact that's going to happen to the public. When it's not just going to Yellowstone, it's also if you have an issue with your taxes. You want to call and talk to the IRS, but there's nobody to answer the phone. You already have problems there. There are going to be issues with how the government is performing. Even though faith in government is at a low, it can go lower. Certainly, there's going to be that their tax dollars are going in, and they're not getting the services that they are paying for.
Fact-Checking Information About Government Shutdown
One of the issues that our students at George Mason and our friends outside of the Mason community face day in and day out is alternative facts. Everybody's hearing a story about this. I don't want to get into the actual reasons for this particular shutdown, although I can tell you for a fact it's not about funding healthcare for illegal aliens. That's not the case. Putting that aside and putting this shutdown aside, I assume you at Taxpayers for Common Sense will have or have some sort of fact-check place for our audience to go to, Steve?
Absolutely. Your audience can visit us at Taxpayer.net, our website. We have five fast facts about the shutdown or about shutdowns, including that they don't save money. We have a longer issue brief on that. Also, we do a Weekly Wastebasket, which is an email missive that people can sign up for there.
Each week, we discuss what the topic should be. Our last topic was about the shutdown. The next one is about the shutdown, but a little bit differently. We concentrate on the potential firing of employees that's been talked about. It was a little bit more about this pocket rescission issue that we can talk about if you want to. We’re still hitting on the shutdown because that is the biggest news as a budget watchdog.
Understanding How Pocket Rescission Works In Government
We have a couple more minutes. Please tell us about that rescission.
Rescissions were also created in the 1974 Budget Act. Instead of impoundments, they said that the president could submit a list of provisions that they wanted to strike from that year's appropriation. It's almost like giving Congress a do-over. They had 45 days to vote on that. Under the law, if you don't vote at all, then the money has to be spent, so they can only withhold it for 45 days.
Congress did pass a rescission package for about $9 billion. That money, which was mostly for foreign aid, was pulled. Director Vought noticed a hole in that, which is if you send the package to Congress when that 45-day window extends beyond the fiscal year, then you're impounding those funds. If Congress doesn't vote, which the Republicans in the House and the Senate didn't vote, then you've wiped away that money. That was the decision the Supreme Court has said that I can stand. If at the end of the fiscal year, the money is gone and they didn't spend it, I don't know how you remedy that anyway. That was what a pocket rescission is. It’s like a pocket veto.
This is important because it spoils any sense of goodwill. What the Democrats did in March 2025 is that Schumer got together with some other moderate senators and said, “We have to keep the lights on, because if we don't, Trump and the OMB will have such power that he might start firing people at will and shutting down agencies. We can't let him do that.”
Schumer got a lot of grief from the base of the Democratic Party. He looked like he was helping Trump. In the months since, Trump shut down agencies, fired people en masse, and did lots of the things that they were hoping to prevent. That plus the rescission left the Democrats thinking, like, “What else can you do to us if we shut down the government? How bad can it be?” The Democrats have their base on their side. Steve was exactly right when he said that what's going to end this is when one side feels the blame and pain so much that they can't take it anymore. I don't know which side that is going to be.
Time will tell. Conventional wisdom is the party in power. In this case, it would be the Republicans. There's a case here where it could be the other side that takes the blame, or both of them take it equally. Steve, to put this into context for our readers, the $9 billion in that rescission package is a rounding error, right? We're spending $2 trillion a month in this government, aren't we?
Yeah. It's a $7 trillion federal budget, so it's even less than a rounding error. It isn't much in the way of savings. A lot of it is optics.
Why We Have To Fix The Federal Budget Process
Any final thoughts?
I think that we are going to have to fix the budget process because what this reflects is a total breakdown of the ‘74 reforms. The idea is that Congress would set a budget target, divide it into the various appropriations committees, and then come forward with a budget in response to the president's budget. This system has barely worked in good times, and it is not at all functional. We should start with a blank sheet of paper and envision a better budget process that deals with weird things like the gap between appropriation and authorization, but also the political reality that we are so polarized.
I'm a former state legislator, so I can tell you, Jerry, that the solution to that is simple. It's a balanced budget amendment. States live within their means. They have to balance their budget, and they have to have a budget and maybe time for another amendment to our Constitution. Steve, the last word is yours.
Thanks. To Jerry's point, since the 1974 reforms, the actual appropriations bills have only been done on time before the beginning of the fiscal year four times. In more than 50 years, it has only happened four times. The last time it happened was in 1997, and the last time they did them individually, where each individual appropriations bill passed on its own, was in 1994.
Tweet: The last time the US federal budget was balanced was in 1998.
Clearly, things are broken. I don't think we can wait until we get an amendment to the Constitution. That will take a while. It's about figuring out better processes, moving forward, and getting people to work together. It has certainly completely broken down, and it's not something that is sustainable in the long run.
To David's point, the last time the budget was balanced was 1998. That's been a while, too.
Episode Wrap-Up And Closing Words
I thank you both. Steve, thank you for your insights, and Jerry, for co-hosting and your academic explanation of some of what we're dealing with here. I'd like to take a second to reiterate the Schar School's commitment to public dialogue on policy and governance, not just politics. We try our best to keep this apolitical. Readers, to learn more about our guests or about the Schar School programs, please visit us on the web at Schar.GMU.edu/podcast. We’ll see you in the next episode.
Important Links
About Jeremy Mayer
Jeremy Mayer is a professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, where he also directs the masters program in political science.
He is the author of Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns 1960-2000 (Random House 2002), the brief textbook 9-11: The Giant Awakens (Wadsworth 2002, 2nd edition 2006), and American Media Politics in Transition (McGraw Hill 2006), and coauthor of African American Statewide Candidates in the New South (Oxford 2022), The South and the Transformation of U.S. Politics (Oxford 2019), and Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in Higher Education (Brookings 2008).
He has written articles on diverse topics such as presidential image management, Christian right politics, public opinion and torture, and comparative political socialization, in journals such as Presidential Studies Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, and the Historian.
From 2001-03 Mayer served as a visiting assistant professor at Georgetown University, from which he received his PhD in 1996. He taught previously at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he won a campuswide teaching award. Mayer is a recipient of the Rowman & Littlefield Award in Innovative Teaching for the American Political Science Association, the only national teaching award in political science. He is also the only two time recipient of the alumni faculty award at the Schar School, and in 2018 he received the Don Lavoie Teaching Award from the faculty.
Mayer has also studied politics at Oxford, Michigan, and Brown. He has trained new American diplomats and ambassadors for the State Department at their Foreign Service Institute since 2002. He has spoken on behalf of the State Department in Germany, Moldova, and Mexico, as well as regularly to visiting foreign delegations in Washington. He has offered political commentary to major networks, including the World News Tonight, BBC, Fox News, Sky News, PBS’s Newshour, NPR, CNBC, and local affiliates, as well as many national newspapers.
In addition to his PhD from Georgetown University, he has a BA in political science from Brown University.
About Steve Ellis
Steve joined Taxpayers for Common Sense in 1999 and became president in 2020 after serving for well over a decade as vice president, overseeing programs and serving as a leading media and legislative spokesperson. A persistent critic of the mounting budget deficit and federal fiscal policy, Steve has testified in Congress dozens of times, served as a Democratic and Republican witness for the majority and minority, and appeared before eleven different committees.
Steve’s comments have been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post among many other outlets and appeared on major broadcast networks. His expertise ranges from earmarks to flood insurance and a lot of spending issues in between.
Steve formerly served as an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard for six years, including tours of duty as a department head and deck watch officer aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Sorrel, managing the Coast Guard’s inland waterway fleet, and managing a small boat-acquisition contract.
Steve received a B.S. in Government from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. He has earned both the Coast Guard Commendation Medal and the Coast Guard Achievement Medal.