Reduce the Debt with Government Funding Deadline

Fiscal Year 2025 will end on September 30, and none of the 12 appropriations bills to fund the government have been signed into law. Without action from lawmakers, the federal government will shut down.

The following is a statement from Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

We’re less than a month away from a possible government shutdown, and lawmakers are once again finding themselves without a plan to keep the government funded. If all 12 appropriations aren’t signed into law by September 30, it will be the 29th year in a row that they failed to meet the most basic deadline in budgeting. That’s not a streak to be proud of.

This is just another sign that the budget process is completely broken. Congress hasn’t passed a real budget resolution in 10 years. Often, they pass no budget at all. And when they do pass one, it’s either full of fantasy math, simply an excuse to facilitate the passage of partisan reconciliation bills, or both.  Going through the process of crafting a budget around the nation’s priorities now sounds like a fairytale – in fact, the President hasn’t even bothered to submit a full budget for Fiscal Year 2026.

Every time lawmakers play chicken with budget deadlines, it risks a wasteful shutdown of the federal government. In the modern era, the government has fully or partially shut down four times, resulting in countless hours preparing for the shutdown, furloughing employees (that were ultimately paid anyway) during the shutdown, and reopening the government after the shutdown. It is a total waste of time and resources and antithetical to the efficiency message that this Administration took office touting.

Importantly, walking ourselves into a government shutdown does nothing to help with the precarious fiscal situation we currently find ourselves in. A shutdown would do nothing to reduce the national debt, which is now as large as the entire economy; wouldn’t mitigate the fact that interest payments on the national debt are larger than what we spend on national defense; and wouldn’t prevent the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare from being depleted just seven years from now.

Policymakers should work to avoid a shutdown while improving rather than worsening our fiscal situation. In light of our massive debt, they should reduce both defense and non-defense spending levels below their current levels and extend the expiring discretionary spending caps to enforce additional deficit reduction. They should also avoid adding to the debt under the appropriations bill through coupling it with unpaid-for tax or spending changes, reducing needed program-integrity funding, or waiving budget enforcement such as the Statutory PAYGO sequester.

It’s time for lawmakers to stop adding to the debt, abandon dishonest budget gimmicks, and commit to fixing the broken budget process while putting our debt on a more sustainable path.

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For more information, please contact Matt Klucher, Assistant Director for Media Relations, at klucher@crfb.org.