A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

On November 12, 2025, President Donald Trump signed funding legislation ending the longest government shutdown in American history. For 43 days, the United States simply stopped functioning. Over 1.4 million federal employees went without paychecks. Sixty thousand private sector workers lost their jobs entirely. The economy hemorrhaged an estimated $92 billion. Air traffic controllers worked without pay while flights were canceled. The IRS accumulated backlogs that may take years to clear. SNAP benefits were disrupted for millions of vulnerable Americans.

And for what? The shutdown ended with a compromise that left both sides claiming victory and both absorbing catastrophic losses. Democrats failed to extend enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies. Republicans presided over historic economic damage. Federal workers who missed mortgage payments will spend years recovering. October’s unemployment data will simply never exist because the household survey wasn’t conducted.

This is the logic of political hostage-taking: accept guaranteed losses in pursuit of uncertain gains. And increasingly, this isn’t a bug in our system—it’s a feature.

The Hostage Model

A hostage situation has a clear structure. Someone takes something valuable and threatens to destroy it unless their demands are met. The threat must be credible. The hostage must matter. And there must be asymmetric stakes.

Government shutdowns fit this model perfectly. The “hostage” is government function itself—everything from air traffic control to food safety inspections to tax refunds. The threat is explicit: meet our terms or we let it all burn.

What makes shutdowns particularly insidious is that they weaponize neutral infrastructure. Government function isn’t meant to be a bargaining chip any more than the fire department should negotiate before responding to a burning building. But shutdown politics has normalized exactly this: basic governmental operations are conditional, always up for renegotiation.

This wasn’t always the case. For most of American history, shutdowns simply didn’t happen. The shift came in 1980, when new interpretations of the Antideficiency Act meant agencies must cease operations during funding gaps. What was once a procedural glitch became a tactical weapon. The first real shutdown came in 1981—a one-day event that felt like an aberration. By the 1990s, shutdowns had become a recognized negotiating tool. Each one made the next more acceptable.

The 2025 shutdown represents the culmination: 43 days of paralysis costing nearly $100 billion, all of it predictable, all of it avoidable.

Game Theory and Mutual Destruction

Here’s the paradox: shutdowns are economically catastrophic and politically risky for everyone involved. Yet they keep happening with increasing frequency and duration. Why would rational actors repeatedly choose mutual harm?

The answer lies in “chicken game” dynamics. Two cars race toward each other. The first to swerve loses face but survives. If neither swerves, both die. The “rational” move is to swerve—but if you can convince the other driver you’ve removed your steering wheel, that you literally cannot swerve, they must choose between catastrophe and capitulation.

Shutdowns follow this logic. The politician who credibly signals they’ll never compromise forces the other side to blink. The key is “credibly.” You can’t just say you won’t back down—you must actually not back down, even when it’s obviously harmful, even when your constituents are hurting, even as economic damage mounts into billions.

This creates a “commitment problem.” Once you’ve publicly staked your reputation on not blinking, backing down becomes more costly than continuing. If you’re a congressman who’s spent weeks on Fox News saying you’ll never surrender, returning home after compromise looks like weakness. Your primary challenger will run ads about how you caved. The political cost of backing down can exceed the cost of continued dysfunction—for you personally, even if not for the country.

Democrats face the same calculus. Give in to shutdown tactics, and you establish that they work, guaranteeing future use. You’ve announced that threatening to break government is effective. So you must hold firm, even as airports descend into chaos, because surrendering to hostage-taking invites more hostage-taking.

Both sides are trapped in a commitment race. Whoever can credibly commit to the most pain wins. And government workers caught in the middle are just collateral damage.

The Asymmetry of Pain

The pain of shutdowns is never distributed equally.

During the 43-day shutdown, 1.4 million federal employees went without paychecks. Air traffic controllers, TSA agents, park rangers, IRS workers—all expected to show up daily with no idea when they’d be paid. Many are “essential” and legally prohibited from striking. They’re hostages twice over: livelihoods held ransom by politicians, labor legally compelled without compensation.

Federal workers aren’t wealthy. The median employee makes around $76,000—comfortable in some areas, barely middle-class in expensive cities. These are people with mortgages, car payments, student loans, childcare. They can’t skip six weeks of income. They drain savings, max out credit cards, borrow from family, visit food banks. Some lose their homes. And they have no recourse—can’t negotiate, can’t strike, can’t easily find equivalent work.

Then there are downstream casualties. The 60,000 private sector workers who lost jobs: contractors, vendors, service workers in federal buildings, small business owners in government-heavy communities. Unlike federal workers, they don’t get back pay. Their income is just gone. Many businesses fail entirely.

Meanwhile, members of Congress continue receiving their $174,000 salaries. They’re explicitly exempt from shutdown furloughs by the 27th Amendment. Some make symbolic gestures of donating salaries, but these are voluntary and rare. The structural reality: people making the decision to shut down government face no personal financial consequences.

This creates massive moral hazard. If you could end your neighbor’s salary but not your own by refusing to compromise, you’d have little incentive to compromise. The political class has constructed a system where they impose enormous costs on others while remaining insulated.

The time asymmetry matters too. Workers feel pain immediately—missing rent, choosing between groceries and prescriptions, watching credit scores plummet. Politicians bet on voter memory being short. By the next election, will voters remember specifics? History suggests memories fade. Politicians learned that shutdown tactics carry minimal long-term electoral cost, especially if you successfully blame the opposition.

The Hidden Costs Beyond Dollars

The $92 billion price tag dramatically understates true costs. Some damage can’t be measured in dollars—or rather, dollar measurements miss the deeper institutional rot.

Consider the IRS. Even before the shutdown, the agency struggled with backlogs from previous disruptions. During the 2018-19 shutdown, millions of pieces of correspondence sat unopened. It took years to work through that backlog. Some correspondence was never processed. Now multiply that for 43 days. IRS officials warn some 2025 backlog may never be cleared. The agency has operated in crisis mode so long that “normal operations” is becoming historical memory rather than realistic goal.

When experienced employees leave—and they do, because why tolerate this when private sector firms are hiring?—decades of accumulated knowledge goes with them. Institutional memory is destroyed faster than it can be rebuilt.

Then there’s the data problem. October 2025’s unemployment rate doesn’t exist. Not “hasn’t been calculated”—will never exist, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics couldn’t conduct the household survey. There’s a permanent gap in the economic record. Future economists studying this period have a missing data point, a tooth knocked out of the timeline.

Economic data isn’t just numbers—it’s how we understand what’s happening. Policymakers use employment data for interest rate policy, program evaluation, understanding whether the economy is in crisis or recovery. Without October’s data, our understanding of late 2025 is permanently impaired.

The compounding effects should terrify us. Each shutdown makes the next worse. An agency still recovering from the last crisis is less equipped to handle the next. An IRS drowning in backlog can’t absorb another month of mail piling up. A CDC researcher who saw their work destroyed during one shutdown might not start another long-term project, knowing it could be randomly terminated. Institutional damage is cumulative.

There’s also international dimension. What does it signal when the United States can’t keep its own government running? When America’s credit rating gets downgraded? When international conferences must be canceled because U.S. officials are furloughed? Soft power is built on credibility, and credibility is built on stability.

Perhaps the most insidious cost is cultural. Every shutdown normalizes the idea that government is optional, that basic services are luxuries that can be suspended whenever politicians feel like it. When shutdowns become routine, we stop being shocked. They become background noise, like political scandals—things that happen regularly enough that we’ve developed a standardized response and move on.

This corrodes democracy. If government exists in permanent crisis, if basic functionality is always provisional, why would talented people choose public service? Why would citizens trust institutions? Why would anyone think long-term when everything might shut down next month?

Why Other Democracies Don’t Do This

Government shutdowns are uniquely American. Canada doesn’t shut down. The UK doesn’t. Germany doesn’t. Japan doesn’t. This isn’t a universal feature of democracy—it’s a specifically American pathology.

Most parliamentary systems have a built-in safety valve: if the legislature can’t pass a budget, the government falls and new elections are called. In the UK, failure to pass critical spending bills triggers a vote of no confidence. The Prime Minister resigns and voters weigh in on who was unreasonable. This creates strong incentives to compromise because the alternative is potentially losing power entirely.

The U.S. system lacks that release valve. The President serves a fixed four-year term regardless of whether Congress passes a budget. Members of Congress serve fixed terms regardless of governing effectiveness. There’s no mechanism for voters to immediately weigh in when the system deadlocks. We just sit there with non-functioning government until politicians decide to fix it.

This is a design flaw the founders didn’t anticipate. Separation of powers was meant to prevent tyranny through balanced competition. They didn’t account for one branch holding entire government hostage by simply refusing to perform its constitutional duty to fund operations.

But structure isn’t destiny. Constitutional arrangements create possibilities; political culture determines which get realized. This is where American political culture becomes relevant. There’s a strain of American conservatism that’s genuinely anti-government, that sees federal operations as suspect by definition, that views shutdowns not as unfortunate failures but as righteous strikes against oppressive bureaucracy. “Starve the beast” isn’t just metaphor—it’s actual strategy. From that perspective, shutting down government demonstrates that much of what it does is unnecessary.

This ideology has no real equivalent in other developed democracies. Center-right parties elsewhere may want smaller government, fewer regulations, lower taxes. But they don’t fundamentally question government’s legitimacy to exist. They don’t campaign on the premise that government itself is the enemy.

There’s also something about American political culture that valorizes individual defiance and standing alone against the system. The lone sheriff, the rebel refusing to compromise principles, the revolutionary willing to burn it all down rather than submit—these are deeply embedded cultural archetypes. In parliamentary systems, refusing to compromise makes you a backbencher who gets nothing done. In the American system, it can make you a hero.

The Paradox of Escalation

If shutdowns are so destructive, why do they keep happening? Because politicians have learned they work—sort of, sometimes, under the right circumstances. And that partial success keeps the tactic in play.

From a cynical perspective, the 2013 Republican shutdown achieved something even though they “lost.” Yes, they failed to defund Obamacare and took a polling hit. But they established themselves as the party willing to go to the mat. For a segment of the base, that display of “courage” was its own reward. Representatives who held firm became heroes, got glowing conservative media coverage, raised money from donors who appreciated their “fighting spirit.”

This is the paradox: shutdowns can fail in stated objectives while succeeding in deeper political purpose, which is often performative rather than substantive. You’re not really trying to win the specific policy concession—the real goal is demonstrating to your base that you’re a fighter who won’t be pushed around.

This creates a ratchet effect. Each shutdown establishes a new baseline of acceptable brinkmanship. Once you’ve done 16 days, 5 days seems tame. Once you’ve done 35 days, 16 is no big deal. The 43-day shutdown would have been unthinkable in 2010, but after years of escalation, it became almost inevitable. We’ve normalized the previously unthinkable through incremental escalation.

The media environment amplifies this. Shutdowns generate massive coverage. Every day government is closed is a fresh news cycle with ticking clocks and crisis rhetoric. For politicians whose brand is “fighting the system,” a shutdown is incredibly valuable airtime.

Primary politics rewards this behavior. In many districts, the real electoral threat isn’t the general election—it’s a primary challenger accusing you of being insufficiently committed. If you’re in a deep-red district, caving on a shutdown could be political suicide. Your next opponent will run ads: “Congressman Smith surrendered. He let them win. We need a REAL fighter.” It doesn’t matter that the shutdown hurt people. What matters is whether you were strong or weak.

Solutions That Won’t Happen

If shutdowns are clearly destructive, why don’t we fix it? There are plenty of proposed solutions. The problem isn’t lack of ideas—it’s lack of political will.

Automatic Continuing Resolutions: A law requiring that if Congress fails to pass appropriations, funding automatically continues at previous levels. Government never shuts down—just runs on autopilot until a new budget passes. This is how most democracies handle it.

The problem: automatic CRs eliminate the leverage that makes shutdown threats effective. Politicians who’ve found the tactic useful would be giving up a weapon. Multiple bills have been proposed. None passed. Both parties have found shutdown threats useful at various times.

No Budget, No Pay: Laws suspending Congressional salaries during shutdowns. The constitutional problem: the 27th Amendment prohibits Congress from changing its own compensation mid-term. Even if legal, it probably wouldn’t work. Members are wealthy enough that missing paychecks wouldn’t create the same desperation federal workers face.

Constitutional Amendment: The most comprehensive solution—restructuring how budgets work, mandating automatic CRs, or creating mechanisms for voters to weigh in when government deadlocks. It’s also completely impossible politically. Amendments require two-thirds of both houses plus ratification by three-quarters of states. Why would politicians vote to eliminate their own leverage?

Cultural Change: Maybe the answer is voters punishing politicians who use shutdown tactics, creating electoral incentives to compromise. But this requires voters to care more about process than outcomes, to prioritize governmental stability over policy victories, to have accurate information about responsibility, and to remember by election time. The evidence suggests this won’t happen naturally.

The real reason nothing changes: all solutions require people who benefit from the current system to vote to change it. We’re asking politicians to voluntarily give up a weapon they find useful. History suggests this almost never happens without external pressure.

What Comes Next

Let’s return to where we started: $92 billion in damage, 1.4 million workers without pay for six weeks, 60,000 jobs permanently lost, data that will never exist, institutional capacity degraded in ways requiring years to repair. All predictable. All avoidable. All the result of choices by rational actors pursuing political interests.

The 2025 shutdown may represent either the apotheosis of shutdown politics or a turning point toward something worse. What’s clear: we’ve reached an unsustainable equilibrium—stable short-term but accumulating damage that will eventually become catastrophic.

Every shutdown does permanent harm. Not just immediate economic damage, though that’s bad enough. The deeper harm is institutional: loss of expertise, destruction of research, gaps in data, erosion of credibility, normalization of dysfunction. These costs compound. An agency shut down five times in ten years isn’t five times worse—it’s fundamentally broken.

At some point, critical systems will fail in ways that can’t be quickly restored. The IRS won’t just be annoying—it’ll be existential, unable to collect revenue. The FAA won’t maintain air safety because too many experienced controllers left. The CDC won’t respond to disease outbreaks because institutional capacity has degraded past recovery.

The metaphor I return to is stress testing. Engineers stress test bridges to find breaking points. What we’re doing is stress testing political institutions, finding how much dysfunction they can absorb before something critical breaks.

The terrifying thing: we won’t know we’ve reached the breaking point until after we’ve passed it. Systems often fail gradually, then suddenly. Everything seems manageable—and then one day something gives way that can’t be fixed.

This isn’t alarmism—it’s pattern recognition. History is full of political systems that normalized dysfunction until they collapsed. Democracies don’t usually die in dramatic coups. They die from accumulated institutional damage, from slow erosion of norms and capacity, from gradual acceptance of the previously unacceptable.

Government shutdowns are a symptom of that erosion. They represent triumph of short-term tactical thinking over long-term institutional preservation, victory of partisan advantage over collective governance, normalization of crisis as negotiating tool.

What You Can Actually Do

Political fatalism benefits those perpetuating dysfunction. When citizens conclude nothing can change, that their participation doesn’t matter—that’s when bad equilibrium becomes permanent.

Here’s what might actually work:

Vote in primaries: This is the single highest-leverage action. General elections in most districts are decided by partisan lean—what matters is who wins the primary. Primary turnout is absurdly low, often under 20%, meaning your vote counts for much more. If you’re conservative and hate shutdown tactics, vote in Republican or Democrat primaries for candidates who prioritize governance over confrontation. This requires homework—researching who’s running, their record, whether they’ve supported shutdowns. Primary voting is unglamorous, but it’s where actual power lies.

Make institutional health a voting issue: Politicians respond to what voters care about. If voters punish shutdown tactics at the ballot box, tactics stop. The problem: most voters don’t prioritize process over policy. This needs to change. Shutdown support should be disqualifying, regardless of policy goal. “I agree with you on immigration/healthcare/taxes, but you shut down government, so I’m voting for your opponent” is a message that would rapidly change behavior.

Support federal workers concretely: During shutdowns, making workers’ situation visible creates pressure to end crisis. If your community has significant federal employment, organize support: food banks for furloughed workers, local businesses offering interest-free credit, community organizations providing assistance. When local news covers food bank lines full of federal workers, when local businesses go on record about damage, when human cost becomes impossible to ignore, politicians feel heat.

Demand specific reforms: When candidates ask for your vote or money, make them commit. Will they support automatic continuing resolutions? Vote against any shutdown regardless of policy stakes? Get them on record. Hold them to it. This only works if you’re actually willing to withhold support when they refuse.

Build cross-partisan coalitions: Shutdown politics thrives on polarization—each side convincing their base the other is so dangerous any tactic is justified. The antidote is coalitions crossing partisan lines around shared interest in functional government. “Republicans and Democrats who think shutdowns are destructive” is potentially large if anyone bothered to organize it. It requires talking to people you disagree with about policy, finding common ground on process while disagreeing on substance.

A Final Word

I’m not optimistic about shutdown politics. The incentives are wrong, structural problems are deep, and political culture rewards behavior we need to discourage. Things will likely get worse before they get better, if they get better.

But I’m hopeful, which is different. Optimism is belief that things will work out. Hope is the decision to act as if they might, even when you’re not sure. Optimism is passive; hope is active.

The case for hope isn’t that change is likely—it’s that change is possible, and possibility requires action. Government shutdowns are a solvable problem. We’re just trying to get politicians to do their basic job and pass budgets without taking the country hostage. This should be achievable.

It requires sustained attention, strategic action, and willingness to make institutional preservation a priority even when it conflicts with short-term policy goals. These are real barriers, but not insurmountable.

The alternative is accepting that American democracy has a slow-motion suicide protocol, that we’ll keep degrading institutional capacity until something critical breaks, that the world’s oldest democracy will fail not from external threat but because we couldn’t figure out how to pass a budget.

I refuse to accept that. Not because I’m confident we’ll solve it, but because refusing to accept it is the only posture from which solutions become possible.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve invested significant time understanding this problem. Don’t let that understanding sit passively. Pick one action. Research candidates in your next primary and vote for someone who doesn’t support shutdowns. Write one letter to your representative explaining why you’ll vote against them if they support future shutdowns. Show up to one town hall and ask one question about shutdown politics. Start one conversation about finding common ground on process.

One action. That’s the ask.

Political change is hard, but it’s not magic. It’s arithmetic. It’s accumulation of individual actions into collective force. It’s people deciding what’s happening is unacceptable and organizing to make it stop.

The 43-day shutdown cost $92 billion and hurt millions. The next one will be worse unless something changes. That something is us. Democracy doesn’t fix itself—citizens fix democracy, or it stays broken.

You understand the problem now. You know why it keeps happening, why obvious solutions won’t work, why structural incentives point toward continued dysfunction.

Now what?