Congress can end the shutdown cycle for good

Last fall, the federal government shut down for 43 days. Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security went 76 days without funding. These were the two longest shutdowns in American history, both in the last 10 months.

People who kept this country running went without paychecks — these include TSA officers screening passengers, food inspectors keeping our meat and poultry safe, and federal correctional officers guarding some of the nation’s most dangerous criminals. Many turned to food banks; some got a donation of sweet potatoes from a local farmer just to get enough to eat. Working people fell behind on rent and car payments and had to negotiate with mortgage lenders just to stay in their homes. The American Federation of Government Employees knows of at least one federal employee who sold plasma to make ends meet.

That is not how any employer is supposed to treat the people who serve it, let alone the U.S. government, likely the largest and best-resourced employer in the world. And the situation was entirely preventable, because the modern shutdown is not some constitutional inevitability. It is a legal accident. 

For most of American history, funding gaps did not shut anything down: agencies kept working on the assumption that Congress would eventually pay what it owed. That changed in 1980, when Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti reinterpreted an obscure 19th-century law and ruled that agencies without an appropriation had to........

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