Why government shutdowns seem to only happen in US

The US government has closed for the 11th time since 1980.

In other countries, governments continue to operate, even in the midst of wars and constitutional crises. So why does this only American phenomenon continue to occur?

For the most part of the world, a closure of the government is very bad news – the result of the revolution, the invasion or the disaster. But in the United States, it has become a kind of negotiation tool for political leaders – and a lasting phenomenon.

The Federal American Government System allows different branches of the government to be controlled by different parties. It was a structure designed by the founders of the country to encourage compromise and deliberation, but recently, it had the opposite effect.

Indeed, in 1980, the Attorney General of President Jimmy Carter published a close interpretation of the anti-fuel law in 1884. The law on the expense of the 19th century prohibited the government from concluding contracts without approval of the congress; For almost a century, if there was a gap in budgets, the government had allowed the necessary expenses to continue. But after 1980, the government took a much strict opinion: no budget, no spending.

This interpretation distinguished the United States from other non-parliamentary democracies, such as Brazil, where a strong executive branch has the capacity to keep the lights on during a budgetary dead end.

The first American closure occurred shortly after in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan opposed his opposite opinion to a financing bill and lasted a few days. Since then, there have been at least ten other people who led government agencies to close their doors, from half a day to more than a month.

The last one, from December 21, 2018 to January 25, 2019, was the longest ever recorded.

While some essential services continue to operate, such as social security payments and soldiers, hundreds of thousands of federal workers are not paid.

During the first term of President Donald Trump, the White House estimated that the 2018-2019 closure, which lasted 35 days, reduced the growth of GDP by 0.1 percentage point for each week that the salary stop took place.

Elsewhere in the world, these closures are practically impossible. The parliamentary system used by most European democracies ensures that the executive and the legislator are controlled by the same party or coalition. In theory, a parliament could refuse to spend a budget proposed by the Prime Minister, but such an action would probably trigger a new election – not a stop in services such as national parks, tax reimbursements and food aid programs.

This is exactly what happened in Canada in 2011, when the opposition parties rejected the budget proposed by the conservative party of Minister Stephen Harper of the time, which had a minority of seats in Parliament. The House of Commons then adopted a motion of non-confidence, triggering an election. Meanwhile, government services checked.

Even in Belgium, which had no government elected to power for 589 days between 2010 and 2011, the trains continued to run.

More recently, Ireland has managed to operate all from 2016-2020 to work under a minority government with a system of trust and supply, that is to say that the parties who are not in power agree to support expenditure bills and trust votes.

But this type of cooperation has become increasingly rare in the United States, where political parties at war seem too ready to use the daily functioning of the government as a negotiation program to extract requests on the other side.

In March 2025, when the best Democrat in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, agreed to support the republican financing plan, he obtained many members of his own party. At the time, he said that a government closure would play in Trump’s hands, allowing him to reduce even more expenses.

But this time, the Democrats seem ready to hold firm, for fear of allowing the health care cuts to pass under their watch.