Government shutdown ends, but at what cost?
November 14th, 2025
By Bryce Vincent Haugen
For the first nine months, the dysfunction of the Trump administration and Congress was a four-time-zone-away abstraction for a Moorhead native living in Alaska’s interior. But it became all too real when the federal government shut down on Oct. 1. Bureau of Land Management records specialist ML, granted anonymity for fear of reprisal, joined about 700,000 federal workers furloughed without pay. Another 700,000 workers, those considered essential, were required to show up to work despite also not getting paid.
“It’s quite depressing,” said ML, a mother of three. “My mental health has not been good during this process … It almost feels like COVID for me, cut off from the social aspect of work and having a lack of freedom to go out and do things without being very conscientious of what it’s costing.”
ML had to pull from savings to cover her mortgage and has been closely watching her grocery spending. She agrees with a plurality of Americans, directing her ire toward Republicans as more responsible for the the longest shutdown in American history, according to a late October Quinnipiac poll (45 percent to 39 percent).
“There’s issues in each party,” ML said, “But I blame the current administration.”
Shutdown ends
The shutdown had a broad reach into the alphabet soup of the federal bureaucracy, from the TSA (Transportation Security Administration), IRS (Internal Revenue Service), and EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), to IHS (Indian Health Service), USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) and NIH (National Institutes of Health), among myriad other agencies. The missed paychecks added up to $16 billion in lost wages. The pain is temporary: There will be back pay.
No one was hit harder than recipients of food stamps — Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP ) —who, in many states, had to wait more than two weeks to receive their benefit, stressing food banks coast to coast. Air traffic controllers, working without pay, retired in droves and called in sick, leading to thousands of canceled or delayed flights at 40 major airports, including Minneapolis-St. Paul, but not Fargo’s Hector International.
Forty-three days after the government closed, Trump signed a package of bills to reopen it on Nov. 13. Most non-essential services are now funded through Jan. 30 and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is among the programs funded for a full year.
The backstory: On Sept. 19, the House of Representatives passed a stopgap measure, extending funding at existing levels through November. Then reps skipped town for more than six weeks. When the Senate failed to pass that bill by Oct. 1, the shutdown began.
More than a dozen times, all but a couple of Democrats refused to vote “yes” on a procedural motion to advance the spending bill, because they were making their support contingent on extending enhanced Obamacare subsidies. These subsidies, first passed in 2021…
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