The current government shutdown is now the longest in U.S. history. It has drained billions from the economy, destabilized essential federal programs that many Americans rely on, and left hundreds of thousands of workers furloughed or working without pay. And in the meantime, policymakers have made virtually no progress on addressing the core policy issue that triggered it — how to address the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidy expansion. It’s time to end the shutdown so that the mounting economic costs, program disruptions, and needless hardship on American families and workers can finally come to an end.
In mid-October, the Trump administration sent “reduction in force” notices to over 4,000 federal employees across seven agencies, including over 1,000 employees at the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Health and Human Services. A new report from the Bipartisan Policy Center estimates that over 670,000 federal employees have been furloughed, while about 730,000 are currently working without pay.
It’s not just federal workers who are suffering. Last week, the Congressional Budget Office released a new report estimating that real gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the fourth quarter of 2025 would be $18 billion lower than it would have been in the absence of a shutdown. While most of the decline in real GDP growth will eventually be recovered once the government reopens, CBO estimates that up to $14 billion of output will be permanently lost. For some perspective, that is equivalent to almost two months of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits that provide food to nearly 1 in 8 Americans.
Now, that program itself is being disrupted, as funding lapsed on November 1. While the Department of Agriculture announced that it will utilize a contingency fund, this action only applies to the month of November and will cover less than two-thirds of households’ current allotments. States are also warning that funding could be delayed for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps over 5 million low-income households pay to heat and cool their homes.
Another consequence of this shutdown is that it further delays the passage of full-year appropriations bills. That is particularly problematic because the government has already been operating under a continuing resolution based on funding levels set more than two years ago. As PPI warned in September, continuing the current funding levels without updates for inflation and population growth threatens to bring discretionary spending — the part of the budget that funds critical public investments in education, infrastructure, and scientific research — below 6% of GDP for the first time in over 60 years.
Unfortunately, the real costs that have accumulated from the shutdown have not resulted in any substantive progress on addressing the looming expiration of the enhanced ACA subsidies. Many Democrats justified the shutdown by arguing that a solution was needed by November 1. But that deadline came and went without any agreement on how temporary extensions can pave the path to sustainable permanent policy, how any expansion should be paid-for, and what reforms can be adopted to slow the growth of rising health-care costs. The only hint of progress is a disappointing bipartisan proposal in the House that would kick the can down the road for two years and pair it with an income cap that recreates the problematic benefit cliff Democrats fixed five years ago. PPI has proposed credible solutions to all of these problems, but they require lawmakers to move beyond short-term fixes and act.
This shutdown has shown, yet again, that using government funding as leverage for policy change is not a strategy — it is a failure of governing. Republicans, who have been responsible for the vast majority of previous shutdowns, place the blame for this particular shutdown on Democrats and reasonably say they will negotiate on the enhanced ACA subsidies only after the shutdown ends. But it’s worth noting that the shutdown would never have happened in the first place if they had agreed to negotiate with Democrats back in September instead of rebuffing their outreach.
As a result, America has had to endure a pointless shutdown that harmed workers, weakened vital public services, and damaged the economy, all without producing any serious solution to the policy challenge at hand. It’s time to end the shutdown and move toward a serious, bipartisan effort to resolve the future of the ACA subsidies in a way that protects the millions of Americans who rely on affordable coverage while beginning to address the real drivers of rising health-care costs. Congress should reopen the government, return to regular order, and do the hard work of legislating — because the costs of inaction are already too high.
