How a government shutdown fuels President Trump's authoritarian takeover | Opinion
Government shutdowns have become an almost routine part of American political life — there have been 14 of them since 1980.
As CBS News notes, “Before the early 1980s, the government would typically continue operating as usual even when funding bills hadn’t been passed, but that changed after the attorney general issued opinions stating that it was illegal for the government to spend money without congressional approval.“
They generally do not last long. The last one, which started at the end of 2018 and went on into 2019, was the longest (it went on for 35 days).
However long they last, shutdowns contribute to public disillusionment with our politics and shake the confidence of other nations in the ability of the United States to conduct public business in an efficient and effective way. According to the Pew Research Center, in past shutdowns, as many as “three-quarters of Americans called the shutdown ‘a bad thing,’ and many in that group (36% of all respondents) went so far as to call it a ‘crisis.’”
Short shutdowns generally do not do great damage to the economy, but each week it lasts reduces gross domestic product growth by about 0.2 percentage points.
This shutdown feels different because it is coming amid an authoritarian takeover of the federal government. Shutting down the government does nothing to arrest that takeover and there is a real risk it will accelerate it.
That is why it feels pointless and is dangerous.
As MSNBC Columnist Michael Cohen wrote on Sept. 19, “(A) government shutdown might represent a symbolic roadblock for Trump’s increasingly authoritarian agenda, it won’t stop him.” Moreover, “a shutdown intended to stop Trump could actually give him and the GOP more power to wreak havoc with the federal government.”
A government shutdown “could lead to the dramatic winnowing of its size that conservatives have sought for decades,” according to political contributors in The Atlantic. It seems clear that the president will have “enormous latitude to determine which services, programs and employees can be sidelined, decisions that could go far beyond what has occurred during past shutdowns,” according to PBS.
We know that the administration has already teed up its plan. The White House Office of Management and Budget is “instructing federal agencies to prepare reduction-in-force plans for mass firings during a possible government shutdown, specifically targeting employees who work for programs that are not legally required to continue.”
During a shutdown, the president will get to determine which government operations are essential and which can be suspended. He can halt government services in blue states but not in red ones in order to exact retribution from people he thinks did not, and do not, support him.
A shutdown will also enable the president to double down on his use of emergency powers. He has already made use of such powers in many different areas.
As The New York Times explains, “Even when Trump doesn’t declare a legal emergency, he describes crises that justify dramatic action…. The climate of emergency can be used to rationalize virtually any action.“ In fact, Trump used “emergency powers more times in his first 100 days than any other modern president has in that time.”
A shutdown will feed that particular beast. And there are more emergency powers that the president might use as the shutdown unfolds.
In 2019, Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National, reminded us that “Unknown to most Americans, a parallel legal regime allows the president to sidestep many of the constraints that normally apply. The moment the president declares a ‘national emergency’ — a decision that is entirely within his discretion — more than 100 special provisions become available to him.”
Trump might, for example, “suspend statutory wage-rate requirements for public contracts” or “suspend provisions (of the law) related to labor-management relations,” to name just two of the things he might do in case Congress doesn’t appropriate funds needed to keep the government running. He might call on the military to do things otherwise done by the government’s civilian employees.
Last March, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had a different view of government shutdowns than he has now. Then he voted with Republicans to avert a government shutdown. At the time, he stated that “a shutdown would give Mr. Trump… permission to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate than they can right now.”
Under a shutdown, the Trump administration would have wide-ranging authority to deem whole agencies, programs, and personnel nonessential, furloughing staff members with no promise they would ever be rehired.”
“The decisions about what is essential would, in practice, be largely up to the executive branch, with few left at agencies to check it,” Schumer said.
And he thought a shutdown would be “the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda. Right now, Mr. Trump owns the chaos in the government….In a shutdown, we would be busy fighting with Republicans over which agencies to reopen and which to keep closed instead of debating the damage Mr. Trump’s agenda is causing.”
It is too bad, in the present moment, that Schumer didn’t heed his own counsel. Little has changed since March — except that Schumer now knows that if he repeats his March performance, the political blowback would be enormous.
Since the spring, American democracy has grown more fragile. That’s why all of our energies need to be focused on rallying to its defense.
In the end, Schumer should have supported passage of the legislation that would have kept the government open and not picked a fight that, at other times, would have been well worth fighting.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.
This story was originally published October 1, 2025 at 9:34 AM with the headline "How a government shutdown fuels President Trump's authoritarian takeover | Opinion."