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Shutdowns began as a way to enforce federal law. Now Trump is using it to take more power
WASHINGTON: The government shutdown, already the second-longest in history, with no end in sight, is quickly becoming a way for President Donald 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 US government closing down services began in 1980 with a series of legal opinions from Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, who was serving under Democratic President Jimmy 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, the Republican president has used the funding lapse to punish Democrats, 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,” Trump 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 altogether.
Why does the US 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 opinion 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 Bill 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 Barack 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. 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 this 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 on health care 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-Virginia, 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, cancelation of money for economic development projects, pressure campaigns against universities and the dismissal of the US 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 staff, 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.”

KINGSTON, Jamaica: A strengthening Melissa grew into a Category 4 hurricane Sunday and US forecasters said it could reach Category 5 status, unleashing torrential rain and threatening to cause catastrophic flooding in the northern Caribbean, including Haiti and Jamaica,
The US National Hurricane Center added that Melissa is expected to move near or over Jamaica as a major hurricane early Tuesday, then reach Cuba Tuesday night, and head across the southeastern Bahamas on Wednesday.
“Conditions (in Jamaica) are going to go down rapidly today,” Jamie Rhome, the center’s deputy director, said on Sunday. “Be ready to ride this out for several days.”
Melissa was centered about 115 miles (185 kilometers) south-southwest of Kingston, Jamaica, and about 295 miles (475 kilometers) south-southwest of Guantánamo, Cuba, on Sunday night. It had maximum sustained winds of 145 mph (230 kph) and was moving west at 5 mph (7 kph), the hurricane center said.
Melissa was expected to drop rains of up to 30 inches (760 millimeters) on Jamaica and southern Hispaniola — Haiti and the Dominican Republic — according to the hurricane center. Some areas may see as much as 40 inches (1,010 millimeters) of rain.
It also warned that extensive damage to infrastructure, power and communication outages, and the isolation of communities in Jamaica were to be expected.

Melissa should be near or over Cuba by late Tuesday, where it could bring up to 12 inches (300 millimeters) of rain, before moving toward the Bahamas later Wednesday.
The Cuban government issued a hurricane warning for the provinces of Granma, Santiago de Cuba, Guantanamo, and Holguin. It also sent a tropical storm warning to the province of Las Tunas.
Airports closed and shelters activated
Jamaica’s two main airports, the Norman Manley International Airport and the Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay, were closed by Sunday.
Local officials ordered the evacuation in the seaside community of Old Harbor Bay in the southern parish of St. Catherine on Sunday.
The order came after Jamaican officials said at a press conference earlier that they were contemplating enforcement because many residents in flood prone and low-lying communities were not heeding the advice to seek safer alternative locations.
Melissa is forecast to reach Category 5 when it makes landfall along the south coast on Tuesday.
Desmond McKenzie, who is leading the Jamaican government’s disaster response, said in a press conference, that all the more of 650 shelters in Jamaica are open.
Officials said earlier that warehouses across the island were well-stocked and thousands of food packages pre-positioned for quick distribution if needed.
Evan Thompson, the principal director of the Meteorological Service of Jamaica, said the storm surge is expected mainly over the southern side of the island.
“There is potential (for) flooding in every parish of our country,” Thompson said. “If you’re in a flood prone, low-lying area, you need to take note. If you’re near a river course or a gully, you need to take special note and find some alternative location that you can move to should you be threatened by the heavy rainfall.”
Some foreign governments are also preparing for the hurricane’s arrival in Jamaica.
The government of Antigua and Barbuda is housing visiting students at a hotel in Kingston. As of Sunday morning, 52 of them had checked in.
“They have a better bounce back regimen here (at the hotel) in terms of standby power and water (in comparison with university dorms,” said Jewel Moore, 19, a chemistry student at UWI Mona. She and her fellow students are enjoying snacks and games before the hurricane arrives.
“The passing of the storm should be okay,” she added. “It’s getting out that will be a problem.”
The erratic and slow-moving storm has killed at least three people in Haiti and a fourth person in the Dominican Republic, where another person remains missing.
Communities cut off by rising waters
Haitian authorities said three people had died as a consequence of the hurricane and another five were injured due to a collapsed wall. There were also reports of rising river levels, flooding and a bridge destroyed due to breached riverbanks in Sainte-Suzanne, in the northeast.
Many residents are still reluctant to leave their homes, Haitian officials said.
The storm damaged nearly 200 homes in the Dominican Republic and knocked out water supply systems, affecting more than half a million customers. It also downed trees and traffic lights, unleashed a couple of small landslides and left more than two dozen communities isolated by floodwaters.
The Bahamas Department of Meteorology said Melissa could bring tropical storm or hurricane conditions to islands in the southeastern and central Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands by early next week.
Melissa is the 13th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had predicted an above-normal season with 13 to 18 named storms.