Shutdown Drama: What Mattered in the End?
Congress narrowly avoided a government shutdown, with lawmakers scrambling to pass a six-month spending package just hours before the deadline.
The media covered the drama—who caved, who played hardball—but skimmed over the actual contents and implications of the spending bill.
We'll scrape through it in the coming weeks for interesting bits of content. If you can't wait that long, here's the full text for you to dig into.
This spending bill is technically known as a "continuing resolution" because it doesn't change things all that much. The net change was reported to be a decrease of $7 billion, some 0.5% of overall federal government spending.
HEREBY HIGHLIGHTED
Federal Savings Committee
The final spending bill didn't pack much of a punch either way compared to the status quo. However, it plays into the bigger question of whether the U.S. government is spending too much.
Now we have DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. On top of that, money manager Ray Dalio has sounded the alarm that U.S. government deficits could bring on a financial crisis.
This week's highlighted policy proposal would add Congress to the mix, with a new committee to rein in spending...
ZINGER
No Such Thing as a Free Shutdown
This Senate investigation found that government shutdowns don’t save money. In fact, they cost billions of dollars.
Across the three shutdowns in the 2010s, taxpayers paid nearly $4 billion in back pay for government workers and administrative costs from disrupted operations.
To put this in perspective, the report says that agencies lost the equivalent of 56,938 years of work in everything from research to regulatory approvals.
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