As the federal government shutdown enters its fifth week, America’s democracy is crumbling. President Donald Trump and his allies are using the shutdown as a tool to speed the implosion along. The government shutdown and an impotent Congress have created a space and vacuum that Trump can use to expand his authoritarian power as he rules by executive order, decree and fiat.
Predictably, Democrats are starting to wobble. Party leaders are beginning to signal they’ll work with Republicans to end the shutdown next week.
With Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits expiring today, and the start of open enrollment for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the real world pain created by the shutdown is coming into full view. More than 42 million Americans, which includes the elderly, children and disabled, could be wondering where they will get their next meal.Over a million federal employees are experiencing extreme hardship because they have not been paid. According to estimates by health research organization KFF, ACA premiums will skyrocket by 26% on average in 2026, and with enhanced premium tax credits set to expire due to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, “enrollees [will] face even sharper increases.”
In total, the shutdown adds more pain to an economy that is already struggling with massive layoffs, rising inflation and soaring housing costs.
Republicans are holding the American people hostage to further advance their culture of cruelty and an extreme right-wing ideology that treats responsible government as an enemy to be made so weak it can be drowned in a bathtub. Congressional Democrats, as the “adults in the room,” will inevitably surrender to the GOP for what they view as the greater good.
For all its historic scope, the shutdown is a relatively easy story for the mainstream press to tell — familiar, formulaic and safe. It provides readers with a compelling narrative, full of political drama and intrigue, heroes and villains, with themes of money and power.
For all its historic scope, the shutdown is a relatively easy story for the mainstream press to tell — familiar, formulaic and safe. It provides readers with a compelling narrative, full of political drama and intrigue, heroes and villains, with themes of money and power. In effect, it’s a daily serial with a built-in countdown timer. Most of all, in an era when norms and institutions are breaking daily, the shutdown feels like a story the media still knows how to tell.
But the real story isn’t the horserace politics — it’s the harm. The shutdown — and, by extension, Trump and MAGA Republicans’ agenda — is hurting ordinary Americans and causing widespread societal stress.
Research shows that such stress can cause an increase in physical, psychological and emotional illness, along with other maladies, up to and including death. Societal stress and other system shocks also can result in increased negative coping behaviors, such as drug and alcohol abuse, and self-harm. In combination with the “Big Vile Bill,” the shutdown is defunding a range of science, environmental, health and social safety net programs, with predictable negative consequences for public health and mortality.
The average American does not have $1,000 in case of an emergency. This means they do not have the resources to weather a week without income, never mind the nearly five weeks the government shutdown has already lasted. Even if these workers are lucky enough to receive backpay, it will not fully offset the financial, emotional and other harm they have suffered.
Most employees who have been furloughed by the federal government are members of the professional and middle classes. These are “the makers” and not “the takers,” “welfare queens” and “parasites” with which the right-wing has historically been so obsessed. Among them is an air traffic controller, a single parent, who has been forced to take a second job as a DoorDash driver to support his child.
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Thousands of other government employees and contractors are now in a situation most of them likely never imagined: Going to a food bank or other charities for help. A food bank in Southeast Washington, D.C., had a separate line for government employees; NBC News reported that “[m]any furloughed federal employees are now waiting hours for help.”
An exchange on the Oct. 24 episode of “PBS News Hour” was also revealing. While journalist Lisa Desjardins was interviewing Radha Muthiah, president and CEO of the Capital Area Food Bank in Washington, D.C., she described a moment she observed while reporting from a food bank location. When a laid-off worker was told that food could run out before she reached the front of the line, “I saw her face immediately start to crumble,” Desjardins said. “She almost started sobbing in front of me. She recovered quickly.”
Muthiah responded by placing the shutdown in a larger context. “There’s just tremendous anxiety across our community at this stage,” she said. “People are already destabilized as a result of so many of the federal policy shifts earlier this year, and now they’re struggling because they’re uncertain whether this is just a temporary loss of income and a cash flow issue, or whether they are going to be paid at all for this period of time.”
Many of the furloughed employees, according to Muthiah, are contacting utility companies to negotiate paying bills and putting “basic things” on credit cards.
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Unlike the working poor — who’ve long learned how to make a dollar out of fifteen cents — as a group, these middle- and upper-class Americans lack the skills and social networks of mutual aid and support required to survive financial deprivation.
In a time of such great crises, horserace journalism that is focused on who is “winning” the political battle over the shutdown is a betrayal of the public interest. Reports like those from NBC News and PBS about the human side of the shutdown are, unfortunately, largely anomalies.
A 2020 report by the Pew Research Center found that “no more than half of Americans had confidence in journalists to act in the best interests of the public, and that the public was more likely than not to say that news organizations don’t care about the people they report on.” This distrust and lack of confidence is well-earned.
To counter this cynicism and to begin to regain the public trust, the news media should be helping the public to connect politics to their day-to-day lives by telling a clear story about cause and effect where the decisions made in Washington impact the lives of everyday Americans far beyond it.
