The longest-ever government shutdown ended on November 12, but Deairra Tracey is still scared.
The disabled mother of three from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, had to visit food banks and skip meals so that her children could eat after the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program abruptly stopped paying out benefits on November 1. After running out of money to buy milk and watching her refrigerator go bare as Congress held a series of failed votes on a funding bill, Tracey told me, she now lives in fear that the federal aid she receives could be cut off again. She is filling her freezer with low-cost items and stocking up on nonperishables in case Congress closes the government again next year.
“I’m going to make sure I have everything that I need to make sure my children are good,” she said. “I have been super stressed, but you have to do what you have to do as a parent, right?”
In the week since the record-setting 43-day shutdown ended, more than 1 million federal workers have resumed their jobs and begun receiving back pay, food aid has started flowing again to 42 million Americans like Tracey, and the air-travel limitations that snarled airports have been lifted. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the billions of dollars the shutdown sapped from the economy will mostly reappear in the form of higher spending in future months, limiting the long-term net impact to little more than a rounding error off America’s $30 trillion GDP.
But millions of Americans face effects from the shutdown that linger in ways that economists may struggle to capture. Infrastructure projects that the Trump administration canceled during the shutdown in an attempt to punish Democrats have cost thousands of good-paying jobs. Farmers who were forced to wait weeks for a promised federal bailout are now approaching the winter planting season with a level of uncertainty that could prove existential. Airports’ ongoing challenges could disrupt travel during Thanksgiving and beyond. Federal workers now back on the job are battling sinking morale and productivity from both the shutdown and months of steep cuts and instability.
The political reverberations continue as both parties gear up for renewed debates over health care, affordability, and government funding in December and January. Democrats erupted into a public fight after eight senators broke from their caucus to reopen the government and fund it through January 30—at which point Congress will again have to choose whether to fund the government or close it down. Some Democrats have called for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to be replaced, and others wonder whether the collateral damage the country sustained during their standoff against Trump was worth it.
Trump said this week he would not support any legislation that extended subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, the main policy goal for Democrats who withheld their votes to fund the government. Still, Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, told me he stands by his choice to vote to reopen the government. Kaine said that he was hearing regularly from constituents about the hardship the shutdown was creating for SNAP recipients, federal workers, and the air-travel system, and that he saw no scenario in which holding out would persuade Republicans to change course. “I think it’s fair to test another side’s red lines in a negotiation,” he said. “But at some point, when you’ve tested them a dozen times over 40 days, then you’re not just testing a red line. You’re just beating your head against a wall—and people are suffering as a result.”
Trump has celebrated the shutdown’s outcome as a “great victory,” and repeatedly cast it as the culmination of a political battle from which his party emerged victorious by being tougher than their opponents. But some of his administration’s actions during the stalemate—including targeting federal workers for layoffs and opting to cut off SNAP benefits rather than use an existing contingency fund—have deepened the shutdown’s economic turmoil at a time when he is aiming to recover lost ground on the economy and affordability.
Tracey, 29, told me she had contemplated canceling Thanksgiving dinner to preserve her food budget. “It’s scary to know that the government is in control of how you feed your family,” she said. “For a person like me who’s disabled, all this stuff is scary, because there’s nothing that I could really possibly do.” Tracey had previously worked as an emergency-room technician but had to leave her job when she was diagnosed with a severe blood disorder that leaves her regularly feeling fatigued and weak. Sometimes she is too tired to even go to the grocery store, she said, so for the time being, finding work is not an option.
A broad look at the numbers reveals the political and economic carnage left in the shutdown’s aftermath: Consumer sentiment plunged to its lowest level in more than three years as Americans expressed concern about the shutdown, according to a University of Michigan survey released earlier this month. The White House estimated that some 60,000 people in the private sector lost jobs because the government was closed. Previously approved projects—totaling more than $35 billion, all in states run by Democrats—were halted by the Trump administration. More than $2 billion in pay was withheld from furloughed federal workers over the course of six weeks, forcing some to rely on food banks.
Behind those statistics are people like Michael Galletly, a veteran who works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Utah. Galletly told me he spent much of the past month calling his creditors to beg for relief as he missed two paychecks. He now plans to cut back his weekly date nights with his wife and other expenses in order to build savings as a hedge against a future government closure. The 55-year-old also told me he recently started having back spasms. “I think that’s from stress more than anything else,” he said. “I’ve been just feeling really, really tense the last several weeks.”
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The shutdown showcased the fragility of the social safety net, as charities and churches struggled to fill the void left by a closed federal government. As Trump’s policy agenda pares back various assistance programs, with upcoming reductions to the SNAP program, Medicaid, and health-care subsidies, the shutdown may have provided a glimpse of what millions of Americans will face when the government opts for a reduced role in society.
Some food-bank operators told me they worried about running out of meals as desperate people began showing up in droves during the shutdown. The nonprofit GiveDirectly raised $12 million and offered $50 payments to more than 200,000 SNAP recipients who’d lost their benefits. But the effort at times felt like “a drop in the bucket” compared with the SNAP program, which provides food for one in eight Americans, Dustin Palmer, the U.S. country director for GiveDirectly, told me.
“People are telling us ‘I took out a payday loan to cover this’ or ‘I’m skipping my credit-card bill this month, and I just will deal with the penalty for that next month,’” he said. The true toll of that hardship may play out over months or even years, he said.
Wendy Edelberg, a former chief economist at the Congressional Budget Office who helped estimate the economic cost of the 35-day government shutdown that ended in 2019, told me that this one is more likely to leave long-lasting scars.
“Most federal workers are probably job hunting and looking for different employment,” said Edelberg, who is now a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. “Much more than in previous shutdowns.”
Galletly said he is already seeing productivity plummet at his agency as workers have returned to the office and tried to pick up where they left off at the end of September. The president of his union local, Galletly spent much of the shutdown fielding calls from colleagues who were concerned that it could go on for months. He said the toll of that stress, and the potential for another funding lapse looming “like the sword of Damocles,” is hurting employee morale.
I heard similar sentiments from other federal employees I spoke with during and after the shutdown.
Yolanda Jacobs, who has worked for the CDC in Atlanta since 2004, told me she has never seen so many employees “so demoralized, feeling so bleak about their careers” as she did when returning to work last week. “You talk to people, and the depression is just pouring out,” she said. Several Treasury Department employees who were laid off during the shutdown opted to retire rather than take their job back, because it has become such a difficult place to work, one Treasury official told me, speaking anonymously out of fear of retribution.
Department of Labor employees in San Antonio called off their weekly potluck lunch this week because workers had not received their paycheck and might struggle to afford food to bring in, according to Imelda Avila-Thomas, who has worked for the agency for 16 years.
During the shutdown, Avila-Thomas said she was forced to visit food banks and sell furniture—including her deceased mother’s favorite couch—to make ends meet. The shutdown came at a particularly tough time: Her savings had already taken a hit because her 2016 Nissan Sentra, which was fully paid off, was stolen earlier this year, and she had to buy a new car.
These were the kinds of stories Everett Kelley, president of the American Federal of Government Employees, was hearing when he decided to publicly call for an end to the shutdown last month. His statement increased pressure on Democrats, who tend to listen closely to the views of the largest federal-employee union.
“Anxiety and depression, panic attacks, worry, feelings of hopelessness—all these types of things that these employees will be experiencing from now to January,” he told me.
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The White House has blamed Democrats for the damage caused by the funding lapse. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters last week that Democratic officials were responsible for denying federal employees billions of dollars in wages. “The damage caused by the Democrats with this reckless government shutdown cannot be forgotten,” she said. Perhaps realizing the toll some workers had faced, the Trump administration said it would offer bonuses of $10,000 for some Transportation Security Administration officers who worked during the shutdown.
But it will be difficult to capture in dollar figures how much damage was ultimately caused by the political stalemate, Max Stier, the head of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that aims to strengthen the federal bureaucracy, told me. For example, he said, efforts to recruit and train air traffic controllers and other crucial specialists were disrupted while the government was closed. The damage from that could take months to reverse, he said.
As the January deadline approaches for the next government-funding cliff, the United States could find itself still shaking off the hangover from the last shutdown—just in time to plunge into another one.
The post The Shutdown Is Over, but Its Damage Is Not appeared first on The Atlantic.
