federal shutdown

Is President Trump going to restart nuclear weapons testing? When will this federal shutdown end? Will Californians pass Proposition 50, scramble the state’s congressional maps and shake up next year’s midterm elections?

Amid a swirl of high-stakes standoffs and unprecedented posturing by Trump, Gov. Gavin Newsom and other leaders in Washington and Sacramento, the future of U.S. politics, and California’s role therein, has felt wildly uncertain of late.

Political debate — around things such as sending military troops into American cities, cutting off food aid for the poor or questioning constitutional guarantees such as birthright citizenship — has become so untethered to longstanding norms that everything feels novel.

The pathways for taking political power — as with Trump’s teasing a potential third term, installing federal prosecutors without Senate confirmation, slashing federal budgets without congressional input and pressuring red states to redistrict in his favor before a midterm election — have been so sharply altered that many Americans, and some historians and political experts, have lost confidence in U.S. democracy.

“It’s completely unprecedented, completely anomalous — representative, I think, of a major transformation of our normal political life,” said Jack Rakove, a Stanford University emeritus professor of history and political science.

“You can’t compare it to any other episode, any other period, any other set of events in American history. It is unique and radically novel in distressing ways,” Rakove said. “As soon as Trump was reelected, we entered into a constitutional crisis. Why? Because Trump has no respect for constitutional structures.”

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that “President Trump’s unorthodox approach is why he has been so successful and why he has received massive support from the American public.”

Jackson said Trump has “achieved more than any President has in modern history,” including in “securing the border, getting dangerous criminals off American streets, brokering historic peace deals [and] bringing new investments to the U.S.,” and that the Supreme Court has repeatedly backed his approach as legal.

“So-called experts can pontificate all they want, but President Trump’s actions have been consistently upheld by the Supreme Court despite a record number of challenges from liberal activists and unlawful rulings from liberal lower court judges,” Jackson said.

There are many examples of Trump flouting or suggesting he will flout the Constitution or other laws directly, and in ways that make people unsure and concerned about what will come next for the country politically, Rakove and other political experts said. His constant flirting with the idea of a third term in office does that, as does his legal challenge to birthright citizenship and his military’s penchant for blasting alleged drug vessels out of international waters.

On Wednesday, Trump raised the prospect of further breaching international law and norms by appearing to suggest on social media that, for the first time in three decades, the U.S. would resume testing nuclear weapons.

“Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” Trump wrote — leaving it unclear whether he meant detonating warheads or simply testing the missiles that deliver them.

There are also many examples, the experts said, of American political norms being tossed aside — and the nation’s political future tossed in the air — by others around Trump, both allies and enemies, who are trying to either please or push back against the unorthodox commander in chief with their own abnormal political maneuvers.

One example is House Speaker Mike Johnson (R.-La.) refusing to swear in Adelita Grijalva, despite her being elected in September to represent parts of Arizona in Congress. Johnson has cited the shutdown, but others — including Arizona’s attorney general in a lawsuit — have suggested Johnson is trying to prevent a House vote on releasing records about the late Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced billionaire sex offender whom Trump was friends with before a reported falling out years ago.

Uncertainty about whether those records would implicate Trump or any other powerful people in any wrongdoing has swirled in Washington throughout Trump’s term — showing more staying power than perhaps any other issue, despite Trump’s insistence that he’s done nothing wrong and the issue is a distraction.

The mid-decade redistricting battle — in which California’s Proposition 50 looms large — is another prime example, the experts said.

Normally, redistricting occurs each decade, after federal census data comes out. But at Trump’s urging, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott agreed to redraw his state’s congressional lines this year to help ensure Republicans maintain control of the House in the midterms. In response, Newsom and California Democrats introduced Proposition 50, asking California voters to amend the state Constitution to allow Democrats to redraw lines in their favor.

As a result, Californians — millions of whom have already voted — have been getting bombarded by messages both for and against Proposition 50, many of which are hyper-focused on the uncertain implications for American democracy.

“Let’s fight back and democracy can be defended,” a Proposition 50 backer wrote on a postcard to one voter. “It is against democracy and rips away the power to draw congressional seats from the people,” opponents of the measure wrote to others.

H.W. Brands, a U.S. history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said, “Americans who are worried about democracy are right to be concerned,” because Trump “has broken or threatened many of the guardrails of democracy.”

But he also noted — partly as a reflection of the dangerous moment the country is in — that Trump has long rejected a particularly “sacred” part of American democracy by refusing to accept his loss to President Biden in 2020, and Americans reelected him in 2024 anyway.

“Americans have always been divided politically. This is the first time (with the exception of 1860) that the division goes down to the fundamentals of democracy,” Brands wrote in an email — referencing the year the U.S. Confederacy seceded from the Union.

High stakes

The uncertainty has festered in an era of rampant political disinformation and under a president who has a penchant for challenging reality outright on a near-daily basis — who on a trip through Asia this week not only said he’d “love” a third term, which is precluded by the Constitution, but claimed, falsely, that he is experiencing his best polling numbers ever.

The uncertainty has also been compounded by Democrats, who have wielded the only levers of power they have left by refusing to concede to Republicans in the raging shutdown battle in Washington and by putting Proposition 50 to California voters.

The shutdown has major, immediate implications. Not only are federal employees around the country, including in California, furloughed or without pay checks, but billions in additional federal funding is at risk.

Democrats have resisted funding the government in an effort to force Republicans to back down from massive cuts to healthcare subsidies that help millions of Californians and many more Americans afford health coverage. The shutdown means Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits could be cut off for more than 40 million people — nearly 1 in 8 Americans — this weekend.

California and other Democrat-led states have sued the Trump administration, asking a federal court to issue an emergency order requiring the USDA to use existing contingency funds to distribute SNAP funding.

Jackson, the White House spokesperson, said Democrats should be asked when the shutdown will end, because “they are the ones who have decided to shut down the government so they can use working Americans and SNAP benefits as ‘leverage’ to pursue their radical left wing agenda.”

The redistricting battle could have even bigger impact.

If Democrats retook the House next year, it would give them a real source of oversight power to confront Trump and block his MAGA agenda. If Republicans retain control, they will help facilitate Trump’s agenda — just as they have since he took office.

But even if Proposition 50 passes, as polling suggests it will, it’s not clear that Democrats would win all the races lined up for them in the state, or that those seats would be enough to win Democrats the chamber given efforts to pick up Republican seats in Texas and elsewhere.

The uncertainty around the midterms is, by extension, producing more uncertainty around the second half of Trump’s term.

What will Trump do, particularly if Republicans stay in power? Is he stationing troops in American cities as part of some broader play for retaining power, as some Democrats have suggested? Is he setting the groundwork to challenge the integrity of U.S. elections by citing his baseless claims about fraud in 2020 and putting fellow election deniers in charge of reviewing the system?

Is he really gearing up to contest the constitutional limits on his tenure in the White House? He said he’d “love” to stay in office this week, but then he said it’s “too bad” he’s not allowed to.

Fire with fire?

According to David Greenberg, a history professor at Rutgers University, it is Trump’s unorthodox policies and tactics but also his brash demeanor that “make this a more unsettled moment than we are used to feeling.”

“Sometimes when he’s doing things that other presidents have done, he does it in such an outlandish way that it feels unprecedented,” or is “stylistically” but not substantively unprecedented, Greenberg said. “Self-aggrandizing claims, often untrue. The brazenness with which he insults people. The way he changes his mind on something. That all is highly unusual and unique to Trump.”

In other instances, Greenberg said, Trump has pushed the boundaries of the law or busted political norms that previous presidents felt bound by.

“One thing that Trump showed us is just how much of our functioning system depends not just on the letter of the law but on norms,” Greenberg said. “What can the president do? What kind of power can he exert over the Justice Department and who it prosecutes? Well, it turns out he probably can do a lot more than should be permissible.”

However, the appropriate response is not the one seemingly gaining steam among Democrats — to “be more like Trump” themselves or “fight fire with fire” — but to look for ways to strengthen the political norms and boundaries Trump is ignoring, Greenberg said.

“The more the public, citizens in general, feel that it’s OK to disregard long-standing ways of doing things that have stood the test of time until now, the more likely we are to enter into a more chaotic world — a world in which there will be less justice, less democracy,” Greenberg said. “It will be more subject to the whims or preferences of whoever is in power — and in a liberal democracy, that is what you are striving to fight against.”

WASHINGTON — The government shutdown, already the second-longest in history, with no end in sight, is quickly becoming an additional way for President Trump to exercise new command over the government.

It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it all started with an attempt to tighten Washington’s observance of federal law.

The modern phenomena of the U.S. government closing down services began in 1980 with a series of legal opinions from Atty. Gen. Benjamin Civiletti, who was serving under Democratic President Carter. Civiletti reached into the Antideficiency Act of 1870 to argue that the law was “plain and unambiguous” in restricting the government from spending money once authority from Congress expires.

In this shutdown, however, Trump has used the funding lapse to punish Democrats, as he tried to lay off thousands of federal workers and seized on the vacuum left by Congress to reconfigure the federal budget for his priorities.

“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” the Republican president posted on his social media platform at the outset of the shutdown.

Democrats have only dug into their positions.

It’s all making this fight that much harder to resolve and potentially redefining how Washington will approach funding lapses to come.

Why does the U.S. government even have shutdowns?

In the post-Watergate years, Civiletti’s tenure at the Department of Justice was defined by an effort to restore public trust in Washington, sometimes with strict interpretations of federal law.

When a conflict between Congress and the Federal Trade Commission led to a delay in funding legislation for the agency, Civiletti issued his opinion, later following it up with another that allowed the government to perform essential services.

He did not know that it would set the groundwork for some of the most defining political battles to come.

“I couldn’t have ever imagined these shutdowns would last this long of a time and would be used as a political gambit,” Civiletti, who died in 2022, told the Washington Post six years ago.

How shutdowns evolved

For the next 15 years, there were no lengthy government shutdowns. In 1994, Republicans retook Congress under House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia and pledged to overhaul Washington. Their most dramatic standoffs with Democratic President Clinton were over government shutdowns.

Historians mostly agree the shutdowns did not work, and Clinton was able to win reelection in part by showing he stood up to Gingrich.

“The Republicans in the Gingrich era, they do get some kind of limited policy victories, but for them overall it’s really kind of a failure,” said Mike Davis, adjunct professor of history at Lees-McRae College.

There was one more significant shutdown, in 2013, when tea party Republicans sparred with Democratic President Obama. But it was not until Trump’s first term that Democrats adopted the tactic of extended government shutdowns.

How is this shutdown different?

During previous funding lapses, presidential administrations applied the rules governing shutdowns equally to affected agencies.

“A shutdown was supposed to close the same things under Reagan as under Clinton,” said Charles Tiefer, a former acting general counsel for the House and a professor emeritus at the University of Baltimore School of Law. He said that in this shutdown, the Trump administration has used “a kind of freewheeling presidential appropriation power, which is contrary to the whole system, the original Constitution, and the Antideficiency Act.”

The administration has introduced a distinctly political edge to the funding fight, with agencies updating their websites to include statements blaming Democrats for the shutdown. The Department of Defense has tapped research and development funds to pay active-duty service members. (And a private donor has helped out.) Trump has tried to initiate layoffs for more than 4,000 federal employees who are mostly working in areas perceived to be Democratic priorities.

During a luncheon at the White House with GOP senators last week, Trump introduced his budget director Russ Vought as “Darth Vader” and bragged how he is “cutting Democrat priorities and they’re never going to get them back.”

Democrats have only been emboldened by the strategy, voting repeatedly against a Republican-backed bill to reopen the government. They argue that voters will ultimately hold Republicans accountable for the pain of the shutdown because the GOP holds power in Washington.

Democrats are confident they have chosen a winning policy demand — opposing big rate hikes in healthcare plans offered under Affordable Care Act marketplaces — but there is an undercurrent that they are also fighting to halt Trump’s expansion of presidential power.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) acknowledged that his state has more to lose than perhaps any other due to the large number of federal employees and activity based there. But he argued that his constituents are fed up with a “nonstop punishment parade” from Trump that has included layoffs, cancellation of money for economic development projects, pressure campaigns against universities and the dismissal of the U.S. attorney for Virginia.

“It kind of stiffens folks’ spines,” Kaine said.

Democratic resolve will be tested in the coming week. Federal employees, including lawmakers’ own staffs, have now gone almost an entire month without full paychecks. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which helps about 1 in 8 Americans buy groceries, faces a potential funding cliff on Nov. 1. Air travel delays threaten to only grow worse amid air traffic controller shortages.

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said he hopes his colleagues start negotiating quickly to end the impasse.

He said he’s been one of the few members of the Democratic caucus to vote for ending the shutdown because “it empowers the president beyond what he would be able to do otherwise, and it damages the country.”

Groves writes for the Associated Press.

Days before the Trump administration was supposed to file its response to a California lawsuit challenging its targeting of gender-affirming care providers, attorneys for the U.S. Justice Department asked a federal judge to temporarily halt the proceedings.

Given the federal shutdown, they argued, they just didn’t have the lawyers to do the work.

“Department of Justice attorneys and employees of the federal defendants are prohibited from working, even on a voluntary basis, except in very limited circumstances, including ‘emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property,’” they wrote in their filing Oct. 1, the first day of the shutdown.

The district judge presiding over the case, which California filed in federal court in Massachusetts along with a coalition of other Democrat-led states, agreed, and promptly granted the request.

It was just one example of the now weeks-old federal shutdown grinding to a halt important litigation between California and the Trump administration, in policy battles with major implications for people’s lives.

The same day, in the same Massachusetts court, Justice Department attorneys were granted a pause in a lawsuit in which California and other states are challenging mass firings at the U.S. Department of Education, after noting that department funding had been suspended and it didn’t know “when such funding will be restored by Congress.”

The same day in U.S. District Court in Central California, the Trump administration asked for a similar pause in a lawsuit that it had brought against California, challenging the state’s refusal to provide its voter registration rolls to the administration.

Justice Department attorneys wrote that they “greatly regret any disruption caused to the Court and the other litigants,” but needed to pause the proceedings until they were “permitted to resume their usual civil litigation functions.”

Since then, the court in Central California has advised the parties of alternative dispute resolution options and outside groups — including the NAACP — have filed motions to intervene in the case, but no major developments have occurred.

The pauses in litigation — only a portion of those that have occurred in courts across the country — were an example of sweeping, real-world, high-stakes effects of the federal government shutdown that average Americans may not consider when thinking about the shutdown’s impact on their lives.

Federal employees working in safety and other crucial roles — such as air traffic controllers — have remained on the job, even without pay, but many others have been forced to stay home. The Justice Department did not spell out which of its attorneys had been benched by the shutdown, but made clear that some who had been working on the cases in question were no longer doing so.

Federal litigation often takes years to resolve, and brief pauses in proceedings are not uncommon. However, extended disruptions — such as one that could occur if the shutdown drags on — would take a toll, forestalling legal answers in some of the most important policy battles in the country.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, whose office has sued the Trump administration more than 40 times since January, has not challenged every request for a pause by the Trump administration — especially in cases where the status quo favors the state.

However, it has challenged pauses in other cases, with some success.

For example, in that same Massachusetts federal courthouse Oct. 1, Justice Department attorneys asked a judge to temporarily halt proceedings in a case in which California and other states are suing to block the administration’s targeted defunding of Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers.

Their arguments were the same as in the other cases: Given the shutdown, they didn’t have the attorneys to do the necessary legal work.

In response, attorneys for California and the other states pushed back, noting that the shutdown had not stopped Department of Health and Human Services officials from moving forward with the measure to defund Planned Parenthood — so the states’ residents remained at imminent risk of losing necessary healthcare.

“The risks of irreparable harms are especially high because it is unclear how long the lapse in appropriations will continue, meaning relief may not be available for months at which point numerous health centers will likely be forced to close due to a lack of funds,” the states argued.

On Oct. 8, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani denied the government’s request for a pause, finding that the states’ interest in proceeding with the case “outweighs” the administration’s interest in pausing it.

Talwani’s argument, in part, was that her order denying a pause would provide Justice Department officials the legal authority to continue litigating the case despite the shutdown.

Bonta said in a statement that “Trump owns this shutdown” and “the devastation it’s causing to hardworking everyday Americans,” adding that his office will not let Trump use it to cause even more harm by delaying relief in court cases.

“We’re not letting his Administration use this shutdown as an excuse to continue implementing his unlawful agenda unchecked. Until we get relief for Californians, we’re not backing down — and neither are the courts,” Bonta said. “We can’t wait for Trump to finally let our government reopen before these cases are heard.”

Trump and Republicans in Congress have blamed the shutdown on Democrats.