For the first time in the last 17 years, the United States government failed to pass a new spending bill to keep the government operational. This means that starting on Oct. 1, the government went into a partial shutdown. Thousands of federal workers deemed not essential for the safety and well-being of the public, such as national park workers and presidential aides were furloughed. As a result, all of these employees did not receive paychecks as long as the shutdown lasted.
The reason for the shutdown was because the Republican-controlled Senate did not want to fund the Affordable Care Act, popularly referred to as ObamaCare. Since the government’s fiscal year runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, when it no longer had money set aside to spend at the deadline, the stage was set for a shutdown in order to avoid accruing more debt. It is against federal law for government agencies to spend any taxpayer money without it being set aside for that purpose by Congress. This forces the government to have to shutdown any agency deemed non-essential, such as NASA and the National Science Foundation.
One of the agencies included in the shutdown was the National Park Service. They run all of the national parks that millions of people visit every year. However, without any funding, the park service was forced to shut down and ask everyone that was camping within the parks to leave within the next two days. This left many tourists scrambling to find something else to do on their trip or find somewhere else to camp. In addition, all other government funded programs, such as AmeriCorps and Peace Corps, were left unfunded. These programs provide help to both America and many other countries.
If the shutdown would have continued, more disastrous effects would have happened within the economy. The stock market was expected to fall and the likelihood of new jobs being created was slim. Since 1977, there have been 17 shutdowns. Most of these shutdowns have ended within three days. The last shutdown lasted for a total of 21 days, from Dec. 16, 1995 to Jan. 5, 1996, during the Clinton Administration. According to CNN, if the shutdown surpassed a month, there would have been significant damage to our economy, most of which would take months to reverse.
The new spending bill was put into effect on Oct. 16. As soon as the bill was signed, the new spending act became effective, and most government offices reopened around noon the next business day. Had the new spending act not been signed by Oct. 17, many people expected the government to run out of borrowing money to continue operations. This would mean that the United States government would have defaulted on its loans for the first time in its history. This would only have happened if Congress did not pass the bill to raise the debt limit by its deadline.