2013 United States federal government shutdown

From October 1 to 17, 2013, the United States federal government entered a shutdown and curtailed most routine operations because neither legislation appropriating funds for the fiscal year 2014 nor a continuing resolution for the interim authorization of appropriations for fiscal year 2014 was enacted in time. Regular government operations resumed October 17 after an interim appropriations bill was signed into law.

During the shutdown, about 800,000 federal employees were indefinitely furloughed, and another 1.3 million were required to report to work without known payment dates. Only those government services deemed "excepted" under the Antideficiency Act were continued; and only those employees deemed "excepted" were permitted to report to work. The previous U.S. federal government shutdown was in 1995–96. The 16-day-long shutdown of October 2013 is the fourth-longest government shutdown in U.S. history, after the 35-day 2018–2019 shutdown, the 2025 United States federal government shutdown, and the 21-day 1995–96 shutdown.

A "funding-gap" was created when the two chambers of Congress failed to agree to an appropriations continuing resolution. The Republican-led House of Representatives, encouraged by Ted Cruz and a handful of other Republican senators, and conservative groups such as Heritage Action, offered several continuing resolutions with language delaying or defunding the Affordable Care Act (commonly known as "Obamacare"). The Democratic-led Senate passed several amended continuing resolutions for maintaining funding at then-current sequestration levels with no additional conditions. Political fights over this and other issues between the House on one side and President Barack Obama and the Senate on the other led to a budget impasse which threatened massive disruption.

The deadlock centered on the Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2014, which was passed by the House of Representatives on September 20, 2013. The Senate stripped the bill of the measures related to the Affordable Care Act, and passed it in revised form on September 27, 2013. The House reinstated the Senate-removed measures, and passed it again in the early morning hours on September 29. The Senate declined to pass the bill with measures to delay the Affordable Care Act, and the two legislative houses did not develop a compromise bill by the end of September 30, 2013, causing the federal government to shut down due to a lack of appropriated funds at the start of the new 2014 federal fiscal year. Also, on October 1, 2013, many aspects of the Affordable Care Act implementation took effect. The health insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act launched as scheduled on October 1. Much of the Affordable Care Act is funded by previously authorized and mandatory spending, rather than discretionary spending, and the presence or lack of a continuing resolution did not affect it. Some of the law's funds also come from multiple-year and "no-year" discretionary funds that are not affected by a lack of a continuing resolution. Late in the evening of October 16, 2013, Congress passed the Continuing Appropriations Act, 2014, and President Obama signed it shortly after midnight on October 17, ending the government shutdown and suspending the debt limit until February 7, 2014.

According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted shortly after the shutdown, 81% of Americans disapproved of the shutdown, 86% felt it had damaged the United States' image in the world, and 53% held Republicans in Congress accountable for the shutdown.

Background

The United States Constitution requires government spending be approved in bills passed by the United States Congress. Some government functions such as the Federal Reserve System are completely self-funded. Others, like Social Security and Medicare, are partially self-funded but may be subject to administrative shutdowns and failures if the government fails to meet its financial obligations. Some programs are fully or partially funded for multiple years and some are funded every year.

The legislation that sets government spending is called appropriations legislation. Since the 1990s, Congress has often failed to pass the twelve to thirteen appropriation bills that set government-wide spending, often passing "continuing resolutions (CR)" to extend existing spending law at or near current levels, and "omnibus" bills that combine many appropriations bills into one. Budget negotiations can be difficult when the president is not of the party that controls one or both houses of Congress. The last budget was passed on April 29, 2009.

If the Congress fails to pass budgetary approval by the end of the fiscal year, a "funding gap" results. The Antideficiency Act requires government functions not excepted by the Act to begin shutting down immediately so that the Constitutional authority of Congress over spending is not breached. The Office of Management and Budget provides agencies with annual instructions on how to prepare for and operate during a funding gap according to the Antideficiency Act. Technically, seventeen federal government shutdowns precede the October 2013 shutdown. Most were partial or for single days or weekends and involved few if any furloughs. The first was in 1976. Only the shutdowns of 1995–96 involved the whole federal government and were longer than four days.

Preceding events

Republicans' 2010 congressional victory

The tensions that would ultimately produce the 2013 shutdown began to take shape after Republicans, strengthened by the emergence of the Tea Party, won back a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives from the Democrats in 2010. Even at that time, some conservative activists and Tea Party-affiliated politicians were already calling on congressional Republicans to be willing to shut down the government in order to force congressional Democrats and the president to agree to deep cuts in spending and to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which had been signed into law only a few months earlier. Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a Republican who had presided over Congress during the last government shutdowns 15 years earlier, said in April 2010 that if Republicans won back control of Congress in the 2010 election, they should remove any funding for the Affordable Care Act in any appropriations bills they passed. Gingrich said Republicans needed to "be ready to stand on principle" and should refuse to fund the new healthcare law even if their refusal would result in a shutdown of the government.

As the November 2010 congressional elections drew near, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, a Republican from Georgia, said that if the Republicans won a majority of seats in the House, they would pass appropriation bills that the President would veto, leading to a government shutdown. Westmoreland told supporters: "We have put Band-Aids on some things that need to be cleaned out. That is going to take some pain. There's going to have to be some pain for us to do some things that we've got to do to right the ship." Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, then running for office as the Republican Party's nominee, said that although a shutdown would be frustrating for many and an inconvenience, it might be absolutely necessary to make it politically possible to restructure federal spending. Conservative political commentator Erick Erickson wrote, "I'm almost giddy thinking about a government shutdown next year. I cannot wait".

Although the November 2010 election left Republicans in control of the House, Democrats remained in control of the Senate and the White House, resulting in a division of power that would lead to a series of clashes over spending priorities and other policy matters. In early 2011, some Republicans threatened to force a shutdown unless the President and Democratic-controlled Senate agreed to much deeper spending cuts. Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois said the country might need a government shutdown as a form of "shock therapy" to raise awareness of the state of the federal government's finances. Conservative activists held rallies in early 2011 urging Republican lawmakers to shut down the government if necessary to push Democrats to agree to Republican budgetary proposals. When Democrats said a government shutdown would have catastrophic effects on the economy and would hurt American families, many conservatives said Democrats were overstating the severity of the effects a shutdown would produce. A Gallup poll of public opinion showed that the majority of Republicans were in favor of shutting down the government rather than having congressional Republicans accept a compromise budget plan, while the majority of Americans overall (including majorities of Democrats and of independents) preferred that lawmakers reach a compromise deal. In April 2011, Republicans in the House of Representatives threatened to shut down the government unless the Senate and the President agreed to further spending cuts as well as to cuts in federal funding for Planned Parenthood and other birth-control providers and to curtailing the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to enforce the Clean Air Act and carbon dioxide emissions. House Republicans gave Speaker John Boehner an ovation when he informed them that he was advising the House Administration Committee to begin preparations for a possible shutdown. A budget deal was agreed to less than two hours before a shutdown would have begun.