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Why did the September 29, 2025 "Government Shutdown" happen? Was it necessary? What is the real backstory?
I began asking these questions on September 29, 2025, and started digging. As I've shared before, we write to clarify our thinking. I've cleaned up my findings to share what I learned.
To fund the Government congress passes a law. So to understand the funding of the government we have to understand a bit about how laws are made. I assume you know the basics or can read up on them elsewhere, but a bill is a proposal for a law. When both houses of Congress (the House and the Senate) vote in support of a bill, and the President doesn't veto it, it becomes law. That's oversimplified but I think a fair TLDR.
Congress has an important concept of discretionary and mandatory spending. Discretionary spending requires annual Congressional approval and includes defense and agency operations, while mandatory spending runs on autopilot under permanent law and consists mainly of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Therefore, the "shutdown" discussed below relates only to discretionary spending.
Normally bills in the Senate require a "simple majority" of 51 of 100 votes (there are a few exceptions in the constitution). However, since the time of the Constitution, the filibuster has been a fact of life.
The Constitution grants the Senate the power to determine its own Rules of its Proceedings. These rules permit debate before a vote, but for a long time, they did not include a provision to end debate. So a Senator could stand up and "debate" (or lecture or read recipes) as long as they wanted and as long as they did so, no vote could be held. We call this the filibuster.
The Senate could always change their rules at any time to get rid of the filibuster (with a simple majority vote), but over the last 200+ years, a majority of Senators have kept the filibuster in place. I interpret the filibuster as a mechanism that requires the 51-vote majority to negotiate with the 49-vote minority to advance legislation. The fact that thousands of Senators have preserved the filibuster for centuries suggests that the requirement to negotiate has been widely valued throughout our nation's history.
Senators eventually introduced rules for cloture, a process I'll oversimplify as a way to end debate (and therefore defeat a filibuster) and force a vote. For my purposes of understanding the circa 2025 shutdown, cloture basically means you need 60-of-100 votes and you can stop a filibuster and force a vote.
Early in President Trump's second term, his administration and the Republican-controlled Congress wanted to make sweeping changes to government spending. Knowing they lacked the 60 Senate votes to overcome a filibuster, they, like other recent Presidents and Congresses, utilized the budget reconciliation process. The way was in "The One Big Beautiful Bill" (Public Law 119-21), which makes numerous sweeping changes to government spending. I'll highlight only two of many of those changes that relate to understanding the shutdown:
I include #1 only to highlight the significance of The One Big Beautiful Bill's impact on overall spending. For #2, bear with me; I'll explain its relevance to the shutdown later in this article.
It is important to note that the One Big Beautiful Bill was a reconciliation bill.
The (left-leaning) Center for American Progress describes reconciliation as "used exclusively as a mechanism to avoid the filibuster and pass partisan legislation":
Reconciliation is a powerful tool that Congress has used to enact major deficit-increasing and deficit-reducing legislation, such as the Clinton deficit reduction package, multiple rounds of the Bush tax cuts, the second part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Trump tax cuts, the American Rescue Plan Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. In today’s era, reconciliation is used exclusively as a mechanism to avoid the filibuster and pass partisan legislation, usually with a slim majority. Indeed, five enacted reconciliation bills have passed the Senate with only 50 senators in support, usually relying on the vice president to break the tie. - https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-does-budget-reconciliation-work/ The article Reconciliation Directives: Components and Enforcement - EveryCRSReport.com describes reconciliation as (emphasis mine): reconciliation process is to enhance Congress’s ability to bring existing spending, revenue, and debt-limit laws into compliance with current fiscal priorities established in the annual budget resolution. Congress uses "the annual budget resolution" as an internal blueprint that sets total federal spending and revenue limits for the year. It is explicitly not law (not signed by the President) and the budget resolution does not require 60-of-100 Senators of the Senate to pass. The fiscal year 2025 (October 1, 2024 - September 30, 2025) annual budget resolution passed on April 5 with a simple majority of 51 Republican votes (with two Republican's and all Democrats voting against).
Since the "annual budget resolution" isn't law, it doesn't authorize any spending. Instead it is an outline within Congress that guides the appropriations process. The appropriations process is performed by introducing appropriation bills of which each provides the actual funding for government activities and programs. Appropriation bills effectively enact the annual budget, tying the funding to the federal fiscal year (October 1 – September 30), after which the funding expires. The Constitution gives Congress the "power of the purse", and the expiration of annual appropriations is a key oversight mechanism by giving Congress recurring control over executive branch activities.
Like most other legislation in the Senate, appropriations bills require 60 votes to avoid a filibuster—meaning they generally require bipartisan negotiation to pass.
When Congress can't get the votes required to pass appropriations bills to "fund the government" on time (when the prior annual appropriations bills expire at the end of the fiscal year), they resort to "short-term funding bills" also called Continuing Resolutions (CRs) which basically just keep current spending the same for a longer period by changing an expiration date, but keeping funding agreed upon previously. And, like appropriations bills, short-term funding bills also require 60 votes to avoid a filibuster—so they generally require bipartisan negotiating to get done.
So to recap:
Apparently, the 51-vote majority party had run out of procedural moves to fund the government via the slim 51-vote majority. They finally required 60 votes to pass a short-term funding bill, forcing negotiation with the minority party. With Republicans unwilling to negotiate on including the ACA tax credits and Democrats unwilling to fund the government without them, both sides chose a "shutdown" rather than compromise.
Of course I read all this from other people. At times I'd take the links I had open in tabs or was reading and saved them. Below are some of those: