Government Shutdown: The Ultimate Bad Policy
To paraphrase a line from President Lincoln’s second inaugural address, all dreaded it, all sought to avert it … And the shutdown came. The manifest cause of the shutdown might well be one’s interest in extending health care subsidies. But the fundamental cause is a generalized failure of Congress to do the work of agency-by-agency appropriations on any kind of meaningful schedule and on any reasonable philosophic basis. I have lived professionally through shutdowns since the first 1995 one during the Bill Clinton administration. They all entail bitterness, this one more than most.