One of the things you quickly notice when there’s a public service cutback is that the cutbacks are always directed to the parts of that organization that interact with the public. The idea being that if the public are seriously inconvenienced by lack of service — I mean more than they ordinarily are, anyway — they’ll raise an outcry and the politicians will be forced to rollback the cuts. This is standard practice because, as a rule, it works fairly well. The current US federal government “shutdown” is a bit of an outlier here, because very few members of the public interact with federal employees between Christmas and New Year, and the ones that they do encounter are (mostly) still on the job. Even those who are not on the job due to the shutdown will eventually be paid for the time they didn’t work, so there are few monetary savings happening: probably the reverse, as the government will be racking up charges for services they’ve contracted for but won’t use during the disruption, and there may well be penalty clauses written into the contracts.
Colby Cosh discusses the oddity of American government shutdown kabuki theatre:
As occasionally happens, the U.S. government is now “shut down” as a consequence of a conflict over budget appropriations between the president and the Congress. Except, of course, it isn’t anything of the sort. Otherwise we Canadians would be meeting with other functioning states to decide what pieces of the United States to break off for ourselves, the way European powers used to do with Poland from time to time. (Newspaper ethics forbid me from publishing a web address for my $29.95 “Make Maine Canada Again” hats.)
The “essential” parts of the U.S. federal government, including the bits that guarantee the territorial integrity of the country, always keep on trucking through these “shutdowns.” (The National Guard is sometimes affected, but on this occasion the Guard has been taken care of by a spending bill that passed in October.) Social Security and Medicare roll on unimpeded. The functions of government that get held up are the ones whose delay or abandonment cause inconvenience — albeit serious, economically harmful inconvenience — rather than anarchy.
If you grow curious about these American “shutdowns,” perhaps because they did not happen before 1981 and do not really happen anywhere else, you discover that this kabuki-like feature is not really a coincidence. As much as Congress and the president may fight very earnestly over things like border walls, they have a common interest in the overall health of the state.
The U.S. Constitution says that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” This is a shared element of America’s legal DNA and the British Empire’s: U.S. government shutdowns are, in a weird way, a distant echo of early-modern money struggles betwixt King and Parliament. Westminster-style governments, however, have evolved so as to minimize the possibility of ugly standoffs between the executive and the legislature. The U.S., not so much.
