Will the U.S. Ever Get a Budget?
Ethan Shenker On October 1, 2025, the United States federal government shut down. It would not reopen for 43 days. When President Trump signed the funding bill on November 12, it brought an end to the longest government shutdown in American history, the 11th one to result in federal employees being furloughed, and by a significant margin the most damaging. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center over 670,000 federal employees were furloughed, while roughly 730,000 continued to work without pay, their wages deferred to some future date that was, for weeks, entirely uncertain. Federal courts began suspending operations. Food assistance for tens of millions of Americans was frozen or delayed. And in the skies above the United States, something quietly alarming began to unfold. Air traffic controllers, federal employees (and therefore unpaid), began calling out. Over one weekend alone, more than 16,700 flights across the country experienced delays, and over 2,200 were cancelle...