Now that the shutdown has dragged into a record length of more than 35 days, it’s gained a sort of lurid grandeur. Earlier shutdowns — and I’ve been covering the government through shutdowns dating to the Clinton administration — were always the talk of the town. But this time, a certain alarm has seeped in, and not only for people immediately connected to the government, like employees and contractors.
Contractors worry not only about business continuity, a highly practical concern, but also about continuity of the relationships they work so hard to maintain. Regulated and process-oriented as it is, federal contracting still has a strong element common to any sales effort: namely, building rapport and understanding with the people you deal with.
I asked the CEO of one contractor services company about this a couple of days ago. He said not only do companies wonder how to reach contracting officers, but whether the particular COs they deal with will even be there when the government reopens The pattern of layoffs, RIFs, firings and resignations seems less like a “pattern” than a totally random mess. Uncertainty has seeped into the merger and acquisition field, which in some sense weakens the industrial base.
Federal employees I’ve spoken with are generally beyond the shock-and-awe trauma and into an attitude of bemused resignation. Many of them feel like a trout whose fresh stream has turned to saltwater. The more senior people feel confident financially but they fret over the lower-paid colleagues who are in real hardship. A neighbor at a Halloween party, a senior person furloughed from Health and Human Services, said as much to me.
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My friends at the Federal Employee Education and Assistance Fund (FEEA) report having to suspend their grants program after being overwhelmed by 7,000 applications.
Over at the Thrift Savings Plan, they’re seeing a definite uptick in loans and queries. Loan requests last month were up 35% versus last year, for a total of 49,700. Withdrawals rose 15% to 121,000. The board of the TSP reported incoming calls rose 23% to 183,000. (They note that 60% of inbound calls got picked up within 20 seconds.)
I’ll make an exception to my policy of not giving financial advice: Whatever you do, keep your TSP balances as an absolute last resort piggy bank. This too shall end, but your eventual retirement will last as long as you do.
Universally, people are, let’s say, puzzled that the ostensible shutdown sticking point in Congress is subsidies — billions and billions of subsidies — for health care plans that were supposed to be affordable in the first place. What’s that got to do with level funding for operating agencies, they’re asking. After all, the fight is not even over the 2026 budget but rather over a continuing resolution of 2025 spending levels.
I was married before my first shutdown. My wife has maintained a polite interest in the arcana of what I’ve covered all these years. Procurement reform or the advent of cloud computing don’t exactly ignite marital passion. So shutdowns to her, as to most of the public, have generally been curiosities more than something to personally worry about. Now she joins the millions concerned about things like air traffic safety and public order. She’s supposed to take to-and-from flights for a short trip soon. How deeply, millions of travelers now wonder, will the Federal Aviation Administration cut into flight schedules to compensate for low tower staffing?
This shutdown feels weirder than earlier ones, for a number of other reasons that form the equally weird background generally of life in the U.S. First among the reasons is the political climate. Until recently, I rejected the idea that politics now are nowhere near as bitter and polarized as they were before the Civil War. Now I’m not so sure.
Second lies the way in which the Trump administration has gone about government reform. I’ve spoken to many federal employees who agree there’s plenty of room for reform, for trimming programs, for updating approaches. But the chaotic activities of DOGE, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, feel more like breakage than lasting reform. My theory is that this approach is a byproduct of the political environment. No one compromises, no one talks things out with the other side, no one tries meaningfully to understand the other. One result: Agencies are treated as if they’re all worm and no apple, to borrow Elon Musk’s graphic phrase.
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So we’ve got government by neck-grabbing. Biden makes 160 executive orders, Trump makes 260. This after a long history of EOs dating back to the early 20th century. Theodore Roosevelt exploded the process with more than a thousand of them. It seems the imperial presidency has only continued to metastasize. Arthur M. Schlesinger coined that “imperial” term more than 50 years ago for a landmark book title. It came out shortly before Richard M. Nixon’s departure from the White House. The EO tallies fluctuate, but the latter day result is government that seems less like a dignified, serious business and more like a capricious thing.
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