To make sure we all agree on what a shutdown is, I’ll just say each year every department gets their annual “salary”. 12 different bills accomplish that. One for State dept, one for justice, one for homeland security, etc. If these don’t get passed, then the dept doesn’t get its “salary”. These 12 bills just passed the House and are now in the Senate.
However, there’s also what I’ll call a bonus. This is supplemental money. The big beautiful bill gave DHS a nice fat bonus. So a shutdown just means you’re not going to get your salary. If you saved money, or you got a nice big bonus, you won’t run out of money if you don’t get your annual salary. Nobody is forced to actually shut down operations just because their annual salary was not approved. They just stop working because they have no savings and rely on their yearly salary to operate year to year. Since it’s illegal to spend money that was not properly appropriated to you, then you just run out money whatever day you run out of money. This Friday is just the day you were supposed to get your annual salary paid.
With that in mind, it also helps to understand the current argument and past argument for a shutdown. This current argument, to me, would create a “clean” shutdown. The ACA subsidies shutdown was not clean.
Not Clean Argument: We are not funding any Gov’t Dep’t and using the pain it creates as leverage to get some other thing, unrelated to funding, accomplished (passing ACA subsidies). Nothing wrong with this, just a lil messy argument.
Clean Argument: The money we are appropriating right now is to fund DHS (ICE). I will not appropriate it until ICE agrees to change and/or we restrict how they are going to use the money that is being appropriated right now. The thing we want to change is the thing we are voting on = clean. Also, because of that, I don’t need the leverage of the other 11 funding bills. Let’s pass those. Nothing else actually has to “shutdown” except DHS. I’m not even sure I’d call this a shut down since most of Gov’t would be open and operating with new funding.
(as has been noted, much of DHS sub-departments have plenty of money without this appropriation from their “bonus” and won’t run out anytime soon…so it can get a lil “unclean” if the argument is about ICE but only say FEMA/TSA runs out of money soon and has to shut down…in theory you can separate the funding bills into sub-department funding, fund FEMA now, but not ICE; but practically the vote is on the broad “Homeland Security” level).
This is oversimplified to be sure but it is the basic framework of what is happening.
Late: The point of this was to show that we don’t need the pain of the shutdown to get something else accomplished/draw attention to some other thing. The thing that we want to accomplish is being voted on right now. Tomorrow.