Category: Politics

Democrats are entering the government shutdown blaming their rivals for rising health care costs. Republicans are countering by leaning into culture wars and attacking Democrats for pausing paychecks.

The partisan salvos crescendoed into Wednesday as each side prepared to answer for shutting down federal government operations after reaching a stalemate over a short-term funding patch.

Democratic and Republican leaders accused each other of operating in bad faith. The parties’ major campaign arms readied a barrage of attacks to hit airwaves and social media feeds across battlegrounds. And congressional candidates rushed to pin blame on the opposition — all moves that portend the battles to come next year when they tangle for control of the House.

Democrats believe they’re starting off the shutdown with the upper hand, pointing to polling that shows they have an advantage with voters concerned about health care. A string of surveys, including a Morning Consult poll shared first with POLITICO, reveal more voters are poised to blame Republicans than Democrats for the funding lapse — though swaths of Americans say both parties share responsibility. Independents across those surveys more readily point fingers at the GOP governing trifecta.

“Democrats have an advantage: It’s a persuasive issue, it’s a trust issue. And people care about it,” Brad Woodhouse, who runs a progressive health care group advising members of Congress, said of health care costs.

But Republicans aren’t ceding any ground as they, too, gear up for a shutdown-era feud.

The GOP already sees cracks forming across the aisle, prompting its House campaign arm to launch a digital ad across 42 competitive districts slamming Democrats over delayed paychecks for military members and other federal workers and accusing the party of “grinding America to a halt” to give undocumented immigrants “free health care.” The party’s Senate campaign committee is yoking Democratic candidates in key races to what they’re referring to as Senate Minority Leader Chuck “Schumer’s shutdown.”

“If you want to talk about how to hold down people’s health care premiums I’m all for that. If you want to talk about how to protect rural hospitals, I’m here for that. But I don’t understand what shutting down the government has to do with that. I don’t get why the two things are linked,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said.

He was echoing Republicans who have blasted Democrats for attaching health care negotiations to government funding, accusing them of holding the federal workforce “hostage” over an issue Senate Majority Leader John Thune and several rank-and-file GOP senators said they were willing to engage in separate talks on. The Congressional Budget Office estimated Tuesday that roughly 750,000 employees could be furloughed each day of the shutdown.

“The people who will be hurt the most are the people that they say they want to help. It’s going to be working people,” Hawley added. “I just think that’s kind of crazy.”

Congressional Democrats’ refusal to support a stopgap funding measure without extending expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies marks a stark role reversal for the normally risk-averse party that typically abhors government shutdowns. And it represents a strategy shift for Schumer, who infuriated fellow Democrats when he sided with Republicans during the last funding fight in March.

Now his party is confident it’s returning to what’s historically been one of its winning issues by emphasizing health care. Democrats are armed with polling that shows opposition to the health care cuts in Republicans’ megalaw and are backed by the same advocacy groups that railed against Schumer after his spring shutdown cave. They’re also supported by surveys that show broad support for extending the enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits set to expire by year’s end.

Democrats have discussed framing their message around health care for months, seizing on the expiring subsidies as another opportunity to hammer Republicans over rising costs and to freshen their attacks against the megalaw passed in July. The party’s House and Senate campaign arms began running digital ads ahead of the shutdown, accusing vulnerable Republican lawmakers of voting to raise health care costs and “standing in the way of affordable health care — on purpose.”

House Majority Forward is continuing its $3 million ad campaign targeting 10 vulnerable Republicans over tariffs and the shutdown until at least the end of next week, according to the group.

The minority party’s bullishness is owed to millions of Americans likely being hit with higher health care premiums, should subsidies expire at year’s end without congressional action — another strain on the health care system on top of looming Medicaid cuts that providers warn threaten access nationwide. Even President Donald Trump’s top pollster has cautioned those cuts could harm battleground Republicans in the midterms.

But there are some warning signs for Democrats.

In a New York Times/Siena survey released Tuesday, nearly two-thirds of voters, including 59 percent of independents, said Democrats should not shut down the government if their demands are not met — a stat Thune’s aides and Republican campaign arms circulated online in the hours leading up to the shutdown.

And some Democrats are breaking rank: Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), one of the three members of the Democratic caucus who voted with Republicans on Tuesday, had cautioned his colleagues ahead of the vote that Democrats “run the risk of not getting any of those kinds of changes to health care” if the government shuts down.

“There’s no such thing as a totally risk-less strategy,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said in a brief interview Monday night. “But this strategy is the right one. It’s the right thing to do morally, ethically and legally.”

Republicans — sensing they’ll be vulnerable on an issue central to many voters determining the makeup of the House next year — are trying to redirect attention to a culture war fight, arguing Democrats are shutting down the government to fund free health care for undocumented immigrants and suggesting Schumer is acting out of self interest to avoid a primary challenge in 2028.

“Democrats are fighting for free health care for illegal aliens. And at the end of the day, that’s not even what they’re fighting for. What they’re really fighting for is their left wing base that hates Donald Trump,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whose push to defund President Barack Obama’s signature health care law in 2013 propelled a shutdown, told reporters at the Capitol Tuesday night.

Trump amplified Republicans’ immigration message in a vulgar, artificial intelligence-generated video mocking Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that he posted after a meeting Monday with congressional leaders from both parties.

The video contains an inaccurate characterization of how the programs operate: undocumented immigrants are largely prohibited from federal health care assistance.

Republicans are also highlighting the shutdown’s impacts — like cutting funding for Head Start programs — in Democratically controlled swing areas. The National Republican Senatorial Committee launched a digital ad Wednesday hitting Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, who voted against the plan to avert a government closure Tuesday, over how the shutdown will affect military families and veterans who may see delays in getting their paychecks and benefits. The NRSC also plans to blast out the ad to voters in a text campaign.

Ossoff is running for reelection in one of the Senate’s few tossup seats next year.

Georgia Democrats, however, are already blaming Trump for losing health care access. In Georgia and Virginia, several rural health care clinics recently announced closures explicitly tied to Medicaid changes under the megalaw officially called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And if the Affordable Care Act tax credits expire, 750,000 people across the Peach State could lose access to health insurance by 2034, according to KFF.

Seth Clark, a Georgia Democrat and Macon mayor pro tempore, dismissed attacks on Ossoff as ineffective, saying he anticipates Georgians will blame the party in charge for the shutdown as they see government services shutter.

“I definitely don’t think a 30-second spot with a scary voice is going to be the one who pins that tail on the donkey,” Clark said. “It’s who called for negotiations and who walked away.”

​Politics

Hundreds of generals and admirals converged on Quantico, Virginia, on Sept. 30, 2025, after being summoned from across the globe by their boss, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, for a session that, as expected, covered what Hegseth often describes as the “warrior ethos.”

Listening quietly, they heard Hegseth promise to make the military “stronger, tougher, faster, fiercer and more powerful than it has ever been before,” and declare that he would fix “decades of decay” in the military.

President Donald Trump spoke for more than an hour in a political speech that derided presidents who came before him. He asserted that “political correctness” would be banished from the military.

The meeting came soon after Trump’s Sept. 5 executive order renaming the Department of Defense the “Department of War.” With that change, Trump reverted the department to a name not used since the 1940s.

The change represents far more than rebranding – it signals an escalation in the administration’s embrace of a militaristic mindset that, as long ago as 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address, and that the nation’s founders deliberately aimed to constrain.

The timing of this name change feels particularly notable when considered alongside recent reporting revealing secret U.S. military operations. In 2019, a detachment of U.S. Navy SEALs crept ashore in North Korea on a mission to plant a listening device during high-stakes nuclear talks. The risks were enormous: Discovery could have sparked a hostage crisis or even war with a nuclear-armed foe.

That such an operation was approved by Trump in his first term at all exemplifies an increasingly reckless militarism that has defined American foreign policy for decades. That militarism is the very subject of my book, “Dying by the Sword.”

Further, the name change was announced just days after Trump authorized a U.S. military strike on a Venezuelan boat that the administration claimed was carrying drug-laden cargo and linked to the Tren de Aragua cartel. The strike killed 11 people. The administration justified the killings by labeling them “narcoterrorists.”

Abandoning restraint – deliberately

The Department of War existed from 1789 until 1947, when Congress passed the National Security Act reorganizing the armed services into the National Military Establishment. Just two years later, lawmakers amended the act, renaming the institution the Department of Defense.

Officials disliked the “NME” acronym – which sounded uncomfortably like “enemy” – but the change was not only about appearances.

In the aftermath of World War II, U.S. leaders wanted to emphasize a defensive rather than aggressive military posture as they entered the Cold War, a decades-long standoff between the United States and Soviet Union defined by a nuclear arms race, ideological rivalry and proxy wars short of direct great-power conflict.

The new emphasis also dovetailed with the new U.S. grand strategy in foreign affairs – diplomat George F. Kennan’s containment strategy, which aimed to prevent the expansion of Soviet power and communist ideology around the world.

Kennan’s approach narrowly survived a push to a more aggressive “rollback” strategy of the Soviet Union from its occupation and oppression of central and eastern Europe. It evolved instead into a long game: a team effort to keep the adversary from expanding to enslave other peoples, leading to the adversary’s collapse and disintegration without risking World War III.

On the ground, this meant fewer preparations for war and more emphasis on allies and intelligence, and foreign aid and trade, along with the projection of defensive strength. The hope was that shaping the environment rather than launching attacks would cause Moscow’s influence to wither. To make this strategy viable, the U.S. military itself had to be reorganized.

In a 1949 address before Congress, President Harry S. Truman described the reorganization sparked by the 1947 legislation as a “unification” of the armed forces that would bring efficiency and coordination.

But a deeper purpose was philosophical: to project America’s military power as defensive and protective, and for Truman, strengthening civilian oversight.

The wisdom of this restraint is clearest in Eisenhower’s farewell address of January 1961.

In less than 10 minutes, the former five-star general who had commanded Allied forces to victory in World War II cautioned Americans against the rise of a “military-industrial complex.” He acknowledged that the nation’s “arms must be mighty, ready for instant action,” but warned that “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Creating new enemies, destabilizing regions

The risky North Korean team mission by the Navy SEALs illustrates how America’s militaristic approach often produces the very dangers it aspires to deter.

Rather than enhancing diplomacy, the operation risked derailing talks and escalating conflict. This is the central argument of my book: America’s now-reflexive reliance on armed force doesn’t make America great again or more secure. It makes the country less secure, by creating new enemies, destabilizing regions and diverting resources from the true foundations of security.

It also makes the U.S less admired and respected. The State Department budget continues to be dwarfed by the Department of War’s budget, with the former never reaching more than 5.5% of the latter. And the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, once the leading arm of U.S. soft power as quiet purveyor development aid around the world, is now shuttered.

Today’s Pentagon budget exceeds anything Eisenhower could have imagined.

Trump’s rebranding of the Department of Defense into the Department of War signals a shift toward framing U.S. power primarily in terms of military force. Such a framing emphasizes the use of violence as the principal means of solving problems and equates hostility and aggression with leadership.

Yet historical experience shows that military dominance alone has not translated into strategic success. That’s the mindset that lost the U.S. endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and failed in interventions in Libya and Syria – conflicts that altogether cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives while leaving the country less secure and eroding its international legitimacy.

“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” Eisenhower said, can compel the proper balance between military power and peaceful goals.

The very title of my and my co-author’s book comes from the Gospel of Matthew – Chapter 26, verse 52 – that “to live by the sword is to die by the sword.” Throughout modern history, true security has come from diplomacy, international law, economic development and investments in health care and education. Not from an imaginary “warrior ethos.”

America, I would argue, doesn’t need a Department of War. It needs leaders who understand, as Eisenhower did, that living by the sword will doom us all in the end. Real security comes from the quiet power that builds legitimacy and lasting peace. The U.S. can choose again to embody those strengths, to lead not by fear but by example.

This story has been updated to reflect the Pentagon meeting in Quantico, Virginia.

Monica Duffy Toft does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Texas A&M University announced the resignation of its president, Mark A. Welsh III, on Sept. 18, 2025, following a controversial decision earlier in the month to fire a professor over a classroom exchange with a student about gender identity.

The university – a public school in College Station, Texas – fired Melissa McCoul, a children’s literature professor, on Sept. 9. McCoul’s dismissal happened after a student secretly filmed video as the professor taught a class and discussed a children’s book that includes the image of a purple “gender unicorn,” a cartoon image that is sometimes used to teach about gender identity.

The student questioned whether it was “legal” to be teaching about gender identity, given President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order – which is not legally binding – that said there are only two genders, male and female.

The video went viral, triggering backlash from Republican lawmakers who called for McCoul to be fired and praised the fact that the school also demoted the College of Arts and Science’s dean and revoked administrative duties from a department head.

Texas A&M officials have said that McCoul was fired because her course content was not consistent with the published course description. McCoul is appealing her firing and is considering legal action against the school.

Academic freedom advocates have condemned McCoul’s firing and say it raises questions about whether professors should be fired for addressing politically charged topics.

As a history educator researching curriculum design, civics education and generational dynamics, I study how classroom discussions often mirror larger cultural and political conflicts.

The Texas A&M case is far from unprecedented. The Cold War offers an example of another politically contentious time in American history when people questioned if and how politics should influence what gets taught in the classroom – and tried to restrict what teachers say.

Educators under suspicion in the McCarthy era

During the Cold War – a period of geopolitical tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that came after World War II and lasted until 1991 – fears of communist infiltration spread widely across American society, including the country’s schools.

One particularly contentious period was in the late 1940s and 1950s, during what is often referred to as the McCarthy era. The era is named after Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Republican who led the charge on accusing government employees and others – often without evidence – of being communists.

Beginning in the late 1940s, local school boards, state legislatures and Congress launched investigations into teachers and professors across the country accused of harboring communist sympathies. This often led to the teachers being blacklisted and fired.

More than 20 states passed loyalty oath laws requiring public employees, including educators, to swear that they were not members of the Communist Party or affiliated groups.

In California, for example, the 1950 Levering Act mandated a loyalty oath for all state employees, including professors at public universities. Some employees refused to sign the oath, and 31 University of California professors were fired.

And in New York, the Feinberg Law, approved in 1949, authorized school districts to fire teachers who were members of “subversive organizations.” More than 250 educators were fired or forced to resign under the Feinberg Law and related anti-subversion policies between 1948 and 1953.

These laws had a chilling impact on academic life and learning.

Faculty, including those who were not under investigation, and students alike avoided discussing controversial topics, such as labor organizing and civil rights, in the classroom.

This pervasive climate of censorship also made it challenging for educators to fully engage students in critical, meaningful learning.

The Supreme Court steps in

By the mid-1950s, questions about the constitutionality of these laws – and the extent of professors’ academic freedom and First Amendment right to freedom of speech – reached the Supreme Court.

In one such case, 1957’s Sweezy v. New Hampshire, Louis C. Weyman, the New Hampshire attorney general, questioned Paul Sweezy, a Marxist economist, about the content of a university lecture he delivered at the University of New Hampshire.

Weyman wanted to determine whether Sweezy had advocated for Marxism or said that socialism was inevitable in the country. Sweezy refused to answer Weyman’s questions, citing his constitutional rights. The Supreme Court ruled in Sweezy’s favor, emphasizing the importance of academic freedom and the constitutional limits on state interference in university teaching.

The Supreme Court also considered another case, Keyishian v. Board of Regents, in 1967. With the Cold War still ongoing, this case challenged New York’s Feinberg Law, which required educators to disavow membership in communist organizations.

In striking down the law, the court declared that academic freedom is “a special concern of the First Amendment.” The ruling emphasized that vague or broad restrictions on what teachers can say or believe create an unconstitutional, “chilling effect” on the classroom.

While these cases did not remove all political pressures on what teachers could discuss in class, they set significant constitutional limits on state efforts to regulate classroom speech, particularly at public institutions.

Recurring tensions from now and then

There are several important differences between the McCarthy era and current times.

For starters, conservative concern centered primarily on the spread of communism during the McCarthy era. Today, debates often involve conservative critiques of how topics such as gender identity, race and other cultural issues — sometimes grouped under the term “woke” — are addressed in schools and society.

Second, in the 1950s and ‘60s, external pressures on academic freedom often came in the form of legal mandates.

Today, the political landscape in academia is more complex and fast-paced, with pressures emanating from both the public and federal government.

Viral outrage, administrative investigations and threats to cut state or federal funding to schools can all contribute to an intensifying climate of fear of retribution that constrains educators’ ability to teach freely.

Despite these differences, the underlying dynamic between the two time periods is similar – in both cases, political polarization intensifies public scrutiny of educators.

Like loyalty oaths in the 1950s, today’s political controversies create a climate in which many teachers feel pressure to avoid contentious topics altogether. Even when no laws are passed, the possibility of complaints, investigations or firings can shape classroom choices.

Just as Sweezy and Keyishian defined the boundaries of state power in the 1950s and ‘60s, potential legal challenges like the appeal from the fired Texas A&M professor may eventually lead to court rulings that clarify how people’s First Amendment protections apply in today’s disputes over curriculum and teaching.

Whether these foundational protections will endure under the Supreme Court’s current and future makeup remains an open question.

Laura Gail Miller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

For weeks, there has been a great deal of reporting about an impending shake-up in the world of television news. Paramount Global CEO David Ellison is in talks to purchase The Free Press, an online media startup launched in 2021 as a conservative alternative to traditional news organizations.

Once the deal goes through, Ellison is weighing giving Free Press editor and CEO Bari Weiss the job of editor in chief at CBS News.

Should she get the job, Weiss will immediately become a “key figure in shaping the national news environment,” in the words of an article in The Guardian.

The writing Weiss has edited and produced over the years, which conveys a deep disdain for legacy news media, offers hints at what that “shaping” might look like. Among the examples: The Free Press has published essays accusing NPR of a “liberal bias” and arguing against diversity, equity and inclusion.

Weiss, who worked at The New York Times before starting The Free Press, quit her job in 2020 as an opinion editor and writer with a resignation letter that referred to the Times as a place where “intellectual curiosity – let alone risk-taking – is now a liability.”

Though it is too soon to say what, specifically, Weiss plans to do should she take over CBS News, her record at The Free Press suggests the network’s journalism would look radically different than it does now.

But even if Weiss dramatically changes people’s experience watching CBS News, it is unlikely those changes will affect how the public feels about CBS News.

This might seem counterintuitive. After all, isn’t someone’s reaction to media dictated by their experience consuming it? A movie is good if we find it entertaining and worthwhile, and it’s bad if the opposite is true.

Waning trust in journalism

Why isn’t the same true when it comes to journalism? We tend to take for granted that people will consume news despite the fact that most Americans find the news untrustworthy and the experience of following the news mentally exhausting. So, perhaps a better question is how people’s increasing distrust of journalism affects their interactions with and perceptions of individual news outlets.

As a scholar who researches the relationship between journalism and the public, I have spent the past five years trying to answer these questions. Since the spring of 2020, University of Oregon professor Seth Lewis and I have interviewed hundreds of Americans about their trust in journalists and journalism.

Our research, which has been published in academic journals and will be published soon in a book by MIT Press, suggests that people’s relationship with news is defined less by their impressions of individual news stories, journalists or organizations. Instead, the public’s views are shaped more by a broad skepticism toward the profession as a whole.

That skepticism has less to do with what the news actually looks like than it does with people’s assumption that journalism is compromised by the pursuit of profit. As one of our interviewees told us: “It’s profits over journalism and over truth.”

This sentiment suggests that for the public it may not matter much whether Weiss takes over CBS, given it will still perceive Weiss’ boss as being more motivated by money than mission.

A bipartisan distrust of news

This profit-oriented skepticism toward the news goes against the conventional wisdom that people trust news outlets that they feel align with their political ideologies and distrust those that do not.

If that conventional wisdom were true, a Weiss-led CBS might alienate a progressive subset of the public while bringing in a conservative one. Weiss’ audience from The Free Press would follow her to one of the largest, most established brands in journalism, while those who share Weiss’ ideological leanings but are not aware of The Free Press would be pleasantly surprised to find their views suddenly represented on CBS News.

This sequence of events makes intuitive sense. Yet it is inconsistent with what we’ve learned about how people think about and interact with news.

Instead, people are likely to see CBS’ new direction less as a sign of a sincere, bottom-up ideological shift by those working at the network and more as a top-down effort by corporate elites seeking to maximize profits.

The people we interview often describe journalists generally, and television news reporters specifically, as being pushed by their organizations’ owners to politicize and sensationalize their reporting in hopes of appealing to – and monetizing the attention of – as large an audience as possible.

“If you don’t get a certain number of views, you’re not making enough money,” one interviewee said.

Another explained that the people in charge of news channels suspect the public is too politically divided for unbiased journalism to be profitable. “Because there’s so much division now,” the interviewee said, “if a lot of journalists went toward being unbiased they will lose a lot of viewers.”

In other words, people are less likely to see the shift as a sign that those running CBS News now believe what they believe. Viewers are more likely to see it as a sign that the wealthy few who run CBS News are simply charting a new path toward monetizing the audience’s attention.

As one interviewee explained, news that the public encounters often ends up taking the form of “whatever the suits upstairs want journalism and reporting to be.”

A CBS News led by Weiss will likely be a very different network. That doesn’t mean it will find a different audience.

As Lewis and I have learned, and as Ellison and Weiss may soon find, people’s perceptions are a stubborn thing. When it comes to news media, those perceptions are less tied to the journalists themselves and more tied to assumptions about the corporations behind them.

Jacob L. Nelson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Some of the nation’s most prominent Black mayors are celebrating major drops in crime in their cities — and grumbling that President Donald Trump doesn’t seem to realize the accomplishment.

Trump has repeatedly insisted that cities, particularly those run by Democrats, are overrun with violence, despite the fact that 2025 is on track to have the fewest homicides ever recorded by the FBI. He deployed troops to Los Angeles and Washington and threatened to send them elsewhere.

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said that ignores the realities in cities like his, which recorded just five homicides in April, its lowest on record.

“When we accomplish those things, then the goal post gets moved,” Scott said Friday at a forum of mayors at the annual conference of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. “People are like, ‘well, what about stolen cars?’”

Scott’s views were echoed by other mayors at the event, including Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, Oakland’s Barbara Lee and Washington’s Muriel Bowser — all targets of the president’s rhetoric about safety in American cities.

Johnson, whose city is experiencing a 30 percent drop in crime and the fewest homicides it has seen in a decade, says the focus is no accident.

“I just want to lift up the fact that the very places that are under attack are all spaces that are led by Black leaders,” he said to a mostly Black audience. “We just got to name it. I know we know that, but I want to say it out loud that it’s very intentional, because there is an extremism in this country that has not accepted the results of the Civil War and they’re fully engaged in the rematch.”

Bowser said Trump deployed the National Guard to Washington under a “fake emergency” that was cover for immigration enforcement. The federal action, she said, has “been very menacing and has disrupted … the trust that our communities have with our own police.”

The federal law enforcement presence in Washington was originally set to last for 30 days ending earlier this month, but has since been extended.

Van Johnson, the mayor of Savannah, Georgia, said many Black mayors applaud and have taken notes from Bowser’s handling of the National Guard deployments and how to resist, but not forcefully agitate Trump in the process — all while juggling the expectations of their citizens.

“We live at the intersection of white fear and Black expectation,” said Johnson, head of the African American Mayors Association. “It’s a very, very unique intersection for us … [because the] white fear is that we’re doing too much, and Black expectation that we’re not doing enough. It is a very hard and very lonely place.”

​Politics

As the federal fiscal year draws to a close, an increasingly familiar prospect is drawing near in Washington, D.C.: a possible government shutdown. And for federal workers, it couldn’t come at a worse time.

In the fractious and polarized political landscape of the United States, Democrats and Republicans have come to rely on short-term, stopgap funding bills to keep the government operating in the absence of elusive longer-term budget deals.

With the parties currently wide apart over the terms of even a short-term budget resolution, the government is set to shut down on Oct. 1, 2025, barring an 11th-hour deal that appears far off. If the shutdown does happen, it would mark another difficult moment this year for a federal workforce that has so far shed more than 300,000 jobs. This is largely due to ongoing Trump administration efforts to downsize parts of the federal government and restructure or largely eliminate certain government agencies with the stated aim of increasing efficiency.

With a government shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal employees would be furloughed – sent home without pay until funding resumes.

As a team of financial economists who study labor markets and public sector employment and have examined millions of federal personnel records spanning such government shutdowns in the past, we have found that the consequences reach far beyond the now-familiar images of closed national parks and stalled federal services. Indeed, based on our study of an October 2013 shutdown during which about 800,000 federal employees were furloughed for 16 days, shutdowns leave an enduring negative effect on the federal workforce, reshaping its composition and weakening its performance for years to come.

What happens to workers

Millions of Americans interact with the federal government every day in ways both big and small. More than one-third of U.S. national spending is routed through government programs, including Medicare and Social Security. Federal workers manage national parks, draft environmental regulations and help keep air travel safe.

Whatever one’s political leanings, if the goal is a government that handles these responsibilities effectively, then attracting and retaining a talented workforce is essential.

Yet the ability of the federal government to do so may be increasingly difficult, in part because prolonged shutdowns can have hidden effects.

When Congress fails to pass appropriations, federal agencies must furlough employees whose jobs are not deemed “excepted” – sometimes commonly referred to as essential. Those excepted employees keep working, while others are barred from working or even volunteering until funding resumes. Furlough status reflects funding sources and mission categories, not an individual’s performance, so it confers no signal about an employee’s future prospects and primarily acts as a shock to morale.

Importantly, furloughs do not create long-term wealth losses; back pay has always been granted and, since 2019, is legally guaranteed. Employees therefore recover their pay even though they may face real financial strain in the short run.

A cynical observer might call furloughs a paid vacation, yet the data tells a different story.

Immediate consequences, longer-term effects

Using extensive administrative records on federal civilian workers from the October 2013 shutdown, we tracked how this shock to morale rippled through government operations. Employees exposed to furloughs were 31% more likely to leave their jobs within one year.

These departures were not quickly replaced, forcing agencies to rely on costly temporary workers and leading to measurable declines in core functions such as payment accuracy, legal enforcement and patenting activity.

Further, we found that this exodus builds over the first two years after the shutdown and then settles into a permanently lower headcount, implying a durable loss of human capital. The shock to morale is more pronounced among young, female and highly educated professionals with plenty of outside options. Indeed, our analysis of survey data from a later 2018-2019 shutdown confirms that morale, not income loss, drives the exits.

Employees who felt most affected reported a sharp drop in agency, control and recognition, and they were far more likely to plan a departure.

The effect of the motivation loss is striking. Using a simple economic model where workers can be expected to value both cash and purpose, we estimate that the drop in intrinsic motivation after a shutdown would require a roughly 10% wage raise to offset.

Policy implications

Some people have argued that this outflow of employees amounts to a necessary trimming, a way to shrink government by a so-called starving of the beast.

But the evidence paints a different picture. Agencies hit hardest by furloughs turned to temporary staffing firms to fill the gaps. Over the two years after the shutdown we analyzed, these agencies spent about US$1 billion more on contractors than they saved in payroll.

The costs go beyond replacement spending, as government performance also suffers. Agencies that were more affected by the shutdown recorded higher rates of inaccurate federal payments for several years. Even after partial recovery, losses amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars that taxpayers never recouped.

Other skill-intensive functions declined as well. Legal enforcement fell in agencies that became short of experienced attorneys, and patenting activity dropped in science and engineering agencies after key inventors left.

Official estimates of shutdown costs typically focus on near-term GDP effects and back pay. But our findings show that an even bigger bill comes later in the form of higher employee turnover, higher labor costs to fill gaps, and measurable losses in productivity.

Shutdowns are blunt, recurring shocks that demoralize the public workforce and erode performance. These costs spill over to everyone who relies on government services. If the public wants efficient, accountable public institutions, then we should all care about avoiding shutdowns.

After an already turbulent year, it is unclear whether an upcoming shutdown would significantly add to the strain on federal employees or have a more limited effect, since many who were considering leaving have already left through buyouts or forced terminations this year. What is clear is that hundreds of thousands of federal employees are likely to experience another period of uncertainty.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The New York Times reports that a senior Department of Justice official recently “instructed more than a half dozen U.S. attorneys’ offices to draft plans to investigate” the Open Society Foundations – philanthropies funded by the billionaire George Soros.

Citing a document that the news outlet said its reporters had seen, the report listed possible charges the foundations could face “ranging from arson to material support of terrorism.”

The philanthropic institution denied any wrongdoing.

“These accusations are politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the First Amendment right to free speech,” Open Society Foundations stated in response to the reported investigations. “When power is abused to take away the rights of some people, it puts the rights of all people at risk.”

The term “civil society” isn’t familiar to all Americans. But it’s part of what helped this country grow and thrive because it encompasses many of the institutions that uphold the American way of life. As a sociologist who studies nonprofits and civil society in the U.S and around the world, I have always been interested in the relationship between the health of a nation’s civil society and the strength of rights and freedom within its borders.

I’ve also noticed that often the term is used without a definition. But I think that it’s important for Americans to become more familiar with what civil society is and how it helps sustain democracy in the United States.

Civil society

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines civil society as “the dense network of groups, communities, networks and ties that stand between the individual and the modern state.”

This constellation of institutions consists of not-for-profit organizations and special interest groups, either formal or informal, working to improve the lives of their constituents. It includes charitable groups, clubs and voluntary associations, churches and other houses of worship, labor unions, grassroots associations, community organizations, foundations, museums and other kinds of nonprofits – including nonprofit media outlets.

Civil society does not include government agencies or for-profit businesses.

Political scientists and sociologists have long claimed that a healthy civil society, which in the U.S. includes a strong and independent nonprofit sector, helps sustain democracy. This is true even though most nonprofits don’t engage in partisan political activities.

My own analysis of survey data from 64 countries has shown that authoritarians have begun to use civil society groups to support their own purposes. But in the United States, at least, most civil society organizations still support democratic values.

Sometimes, scholars call civil society “the third sector” to distinguish it from the public and private spheres.

Most scholars agree that civil society strengthens and protects democracy, and that true democracy is impossible without it. These scholars distinguish between liberal democracies and illiberal democracies.

Liberal democracies have a separation of powers – meaning the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government. They protect individual rights, allow a free press, maintain an independent judiciary and safeguard the rights of minorities.

In illiberal democracies, there are periodic elections, but they are not necessarily fair or free. Civil society tends to be more restricted in illiberal democracies than in liberal ones.

An American strength from the start

The strength of America’s civil society helps explain the long success of democracy in the United States.

In 1835, when the French scholar and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the country, he marveled at the tendency of Americans to “constantly unite.” They created associations, he wrote, “to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools.”

Whereas the government initiated grand projects in France and the nobility did so in England, in the United States voluntary associations of ordinary individuals were behind most great endeavors.

What happens in nondemocratic countries

One way to see how important a robust civil society can be is to look at what happens in countries that do not have one.

The totalitarian countries of the 20th century, particularly communist China and the Soviet Union, outlawed civil society under the pretense that the party and the state represented the people’s true interests.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the United States and Western Europe devoted much diplomacy and foreign aid to helping the former USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe develop civil society institutions, believing this to be a precondition of those countries’ transition to democracy.

Today, civil society flourishes in formerly communist nations that have successfully made the transition to democracy, such as the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Civil society is restricted in that region’s countries that don’t embrace democracy, such as Belarus and Russia.

Not your grandma’s authoritarians

Today’s authoritarian rulers realize that civil society has the potential to support democracy and pry loose their grip on power. But few of those leaders outlaw civil society organizations entirely.

Instead, authoritarian leaders subordinate civil society organizations to achieve their own ends. In China, which had no civil society before the 1990s, the Communist Party now creates government-organized nongovernmental organizations, or GONGOs, which look like nonprofits and are technically separate from the state, but remain under state control.

Some authoritarians who take power in countries that already have a civil society sector tame these organizations and harness their power through a range of oppressive tactics. They leave alone service-providing organizations, like food banks, free clinics and homeless shelters, and use them to show citizens how they are bringing them benefits.

However, they crack down on advocacy organizations, such as human rights groups, labor unions and feminist groups, as these are a source of potential opposition to the regime. They then cultivate pro-regime civil society institutions, providing them with formal and informal support.

When authoritarians crack down on civil society groups, they sometimes destroy offices and imprison the organization’s leaders and members of their staff. But they generally use more subtle means.

For example, they may pass laws restricting the amount of funding, particularly foreign funding, available to nonprofits. They add layers of red tape that make it hard for nonprofits to operate, such as audits, registration requirements and information requests.

Authoritarians may use those hurdles selectively. Nonprofits that are neutral or friendly to the regime may find they can operate freely. Nonprofits the regime perceives as opponents undergo extensive audits, are forced to wait a long time when they seek to incorporate, and face constant demands for personal information about their funders, members and clients.

Attacks in the United States

Even before news broke of the Trump administration’s reported demand that the Open Societies Foundations be investigated, there were mounting signs that the U.S. was becoming more like authoritarian countries than it used to be in terms of how it treats civil society.

In March 2025, for example, President Donald Trump signed an executive order restricting a federal program that forgives student loans for people who work in public service organizations or the government. The order said that employees of institutions that the Trump administration deems to “have a substantial illegal purpose,” such as providing services to undocumented immigrants or serving the needs of transgender clients, would become ineligible for loan forgiveness.

Over the summer, Congress held three investigative hearings on nonprofits. The Republican Party’s leadership signaled its disdain and distrust of those groups with hearing titles like “Public Funds, Private Agendas: NGOs Gone Wild, ”How Leftist Nonprofit Networks Exploit Federal Tax Dollars to Advance a Radical Agenda,“ and “An Inside Job: How NGOs Facilitated the Biden Border Crisis.”

After the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Vice President JD Vance threatened “to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence,” including the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations, despite the fact that there is no evidence that these organizations support violence.

Some nonprofits have published open letters, issued public statements and provided congressional testimony in opposition to the administration’s claims.

What happens next is unclear. The threat to strip organizations of their nonprofit status may be an empty one, given that the Supreme Court has already ruled that doing so is regulated by law and the president cannot do it on a whim.

Many scholars of nonprofits are watching to see if the United States takes more steps down this road to authoritarianism, stays where it is or reverses course.

We are studying how America’s flourishing civil society resists any restrictions that limit the freedoms that have largely been taken for granted – until now.

Christopher Justin Einolf does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation