President Donald Trump seems to be doing it all! After shaking the world with tariff wars, negotiating global peace plans (as per him) and playing around with who stays and who leaves a primarily immigrant nation, he has now come closer home and shut down his own government.
In most democracies, budget battles end with bruised egos or fallen governments. However, in the United States of America, they end with barricaded museums, furloughed workers, and a “Closed” sign slapped on what is perceived to be the world’s most powerful state. Welcome to Shutdown Theatre—where the US Congress plays the lead, the US Constitution directs, and the audience is the bewildered public worldwide.
The script is familiar. As deadlines loom, the Congress lurches into high drama: leaders trade barbs on cable news, the President threatens a veto, and markets brace for impact. In most countries, this would be the climax. In Washington DC, it’s just Act One. The real drama begins when the lights go out—literally—at national parks, research labs, and passport offices. Tourists are turned away from monuments (I experienced this at the Lincoln Monument during the October 2013 shutdown), scientists are told to pack up their experiments, and federal workers become unwilling extras in a play they never auditioned for.
What makes this spectacle uniquely American is not the bickering—it’s the stage design. The U.S. Constitution scatters budget power like confetti: the House drafts appropriations, the Senate rewrites them, the President can veto, and no one has the final word. Add weak party discipline and a taste for brinkmanship, and you have a recipe for encore performances. Freedom for all, and responsibility of none! Curtain down, popcorn sold out.
While other democracies resolve budget fights by changing governments, the USA resolves them by closing the government; contrasting with Westminster systems like Britain and India, where the executive dominates the budget process. The government introduces a single appropriations bill, and failure to pass it is tantamount to a vote of no confidence. Party discipline ensures members rarely defy their leadership, and upper houses cannot block money bills. The result: budgets pass, governments may fall, but the state never shuts down.
History underscores the difference. Britain has weathered seismic political shocks—most recently Brexit—without shuttering its government over a budget impasse. India has overhauled its fiscal architecture in the past decade—advancing the budget date, introducing the Goods and Services Tax, and streamlining direct taxation bills, along with devolving a larger revenue share to the states. These reforms have modernized fiscal governance, but never once has India faced the absurdity of a government shutdown.
The US, by contrast, has made shutdowns a recurring ritual. Since the modern budget process was established in the 1970s, there have been more than 20 funding gaps, with several leading to full or partial shutdowns. The 1995-96 standoff between President Bill Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich closed the government for 21 days. The 2013 shutdown over the Affordable Care Act lasted 16 days. The 2018-19 shutdown, sparked by disputes over border wall funding, dragged on for 35 days—the longest in U.S. history. Each episode inflicted economic costs, disrupted services, and eroded public trust, yet the cycle repeats, with profound uncertainty.
The irony is that even when Washington avoids a shutdown, it never learns, calling out the absurdity of the whole exercise. It rarely passes a full budget—the last time all twelve regular appropriations bills (one bill per subcommittee of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees) were enacted individually and on time was for Fiscal Year 1997!
Passing a proper appropriations bill has become the exception, not the rule. For nearly the last three decades, the US Congress has limped along on a diet of Continuing Resolutions—stopgap measures that simply extend last year’s spending levels. These Continuing Resolutions keep the lights on but prevent long-term planning, starve agencies of certainty, and turn the world’s largest economy into a hand-to-mouth operation.
The US Congress has relied on sprawling omnibus or consolidated appropriations acts—giant packages that bundle multiple bills together, often passed months late. From the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014 through to the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2024, these mega-bills have become the norm. While they avert shutdowns, they also erode transparency and accountability. Even President Trump’s much-touted One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025—signed on July 4th after a razor-thin vote—was not a return to regular budgeting. It was a reconciliation mega-package that rewrote taxes, entitlements, and defense spending in one stroke, pushing the so-called planned defense outlays past a trillion dollars. It was a fiscal spectacle, and procedurally not one of the twelve appropriations bills that fund government operations. Even after its passage, Congress still had to pass Continuing Resolutions to keep agencies running into FY2026.
Why? Because shutdowns and stopgaps are not accidents. They are the logical expression of America’s fragmented budgetary system. The framers of the Constitution prized checks and balances over efficiency. They feared concentrated power more than paralysis. In today’s polarized climate, that design produces not compromise but stalemate.
So, the next time Washington stages its shutdown drama, don’t mistake it for a crisis. It’s a rerun. The actors change, the script barely does, and the ending is always the same: the world’s largest economy proving, once again, that it can trip over its own shoelaces—and call it constitutional design. While President Trump’s antics seek to reinforce American hegemony globally, this constitutional theatre of the absurd undermines world confidence in the US and helps shape the new multi-polar world.
