United States, shared purpose
Federal funding gaps and the 2019 shutdown
The Congressional Research Service records 20 federal funding-gap shutdowns with at least one full day between FY1977 and FY2019, including the 35-day partial shutdown from 21 December 2018 to 25 January 2019, the longest in the period it surveys.
35 days, longest partial federal shutdown, 2019-01-25. 20 shutdowns, funding-gap shutdowns with at least one full day, 1977-2019. Congressional Research Service, Past Government Shutdowns: Key Resources, retrieved 2026-08-31.
The move, and what it needed
The US appropriations process allows a lapse in budget authority to stop or furlough parts of the federal government, turning unresolved political conflict into an interruption of administration. Continuing resolutions and contingency plans soften the shock but do not remove the incentive or the coordination cost of brinkmanship.
Preconditions
- Separated institutions in which the executive and legislature can block or condition annual appropriations
- A legal shutdown rule that makes funding lapses administratively real rather than automatically extending the prior budget
- Political parties willing to use public-service disruption as leverage, plus contingency systems that limit but cannot eliminate the damage
Where else it has been used: Funding-gap reversals travel as a warning: constitutional checks need a credible continuity mechanism, or polarised bargaining can turn a disagreement into a measurable loss of state capacity.
Limits: Shutdown duration and frequency are institutional consequences that can reflect constitutional rules, divided government and bargaining strategy, not a direct measure of public attitudes or latent polarisation. The CRS series ends in FY2019 for this historical resource, and a shutdown's operational cost varies with which agencies lose budget authority.
This record describes what United States delivered. It is linked to Political polarisation because no comparable dataset measures that capability. It does not affect the score or confidence.
More from United States
10 other deliveries from this country.
Measles elimination, and its erosion
The United States eliminated endemic measles transmission by 2000 through school-entry vaccination requirements, and falling coverage brought 2,777 confirmed cases by August 2026, the most since 1991, against 285 in all of 2024.
Affordable Connectivity Program, and its lapse
The Federal Communications Commission ran the Affordable Connectivity Program from 31 December 2021, paying monthly broadband discounts through voluntarily participating internet providers to more than 23 million enrolled households, and ended it on 1 June 2024 when the funding Congress had provided ran out.
Under the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the federal government and the states built the Interstate System. In nominal dollars, the estimated federal cost to complete it rose from $34 billion in the 1958 Interstate Cost Estimate to $114 billion in the final estimate of 1991.
Operation Warp Speed, an HHS and DOD partnership, financed private vaccine makers' development, at-risk manufacturing and advance purchases, including a $5.97 billion contract for 300 million Pfizer/BioNTech doses. Three of the vaccines it bought held FDA emergency use authorization by 1 March 2021, the first from 11 December 2020.
Office of Technology Assessment, defunded and closed in 1995
Congress gave the Office of Technology Assessment, created under the Technology Assessment Act of 1972, the statutory function to provide early indications of the probable impacts of technology; it appropriated $21,970,000 for the office with a cap of 143 staff for fiscal year 1995, then appropriated $3,615,000 for fiscal year 1996 to carry out its orderly closure, with no more than 17 employees paid except for severance.
CFPB Compliance Assistance Sandbox, rescinded in 2022 and withdrawn again in 2025
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau opened a national Compliance Assistance Sandbox in September 2019, issued two sandbox approval orders in December 2020, terminated one of them in June 2022 and rescinded the policy with effect from 30 September 2022; a reissued version of January 2025 was withdrawn in May 2025.
Federally funded, state-administered adult basic, adult secondary and English language programmes served 2,629,643 participants in fiscal year 2000, and by fiscal year 2021 served 770,179, after a fall through every year the table shows up to fiscal year 2020 (627,728) and a partial rebound in 2021.
Manufacturing USA innovation institutes
In fiscal 2023 the 16 reporting Manufacturing USA institutes, public-private consortia sponsored by the Departments of Commerce, Defense and Energy, managed 929 applied research and development projects and held 2,921 memberships, 655 of them universities, community colleges and other academic members alongside 1,315 small and 493 large manufacturers.
National Flood Insurance Program coverage, and its erosion
OpenFEMA's records of National Flood Insurance Program contracts in force fell from 4,667,875 on 31 December 2009 to 3,589,275 on 31 December 2025, a fall of about 23 percent in the federal flood insurance base over 16 years.
Expanded Child Tax Credit of 2021, and its lapse
The American Rescue Plan, passed in March 2021, expanded the Child Tax Credit and made it payable monthly, and on 15 July 2021 the IRS paid roughly 15 billion dollars to families of nearly 60 million children; Congress did not extend the expansion beyond 2021.