Keep the Federal Government Closed

That the “government shutdown” is disruptive is an indictment of just how far we’ve let the federal Leviathan intrude into areas it doesn’t belong. Of course, it’s not really a shutdown; it’s a temporary suspension of nonessential activities while lawmakers posture over budget issues for the edification of their core supporters. But we still see the air traffic control system in chaos and all too many Americans complaining that they won’t get full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits because government officials always inconvenience the public first even as most of the federal behemoth chugs on as always. They want to convince us we need the state and get us begging for it to reopen.

Instead, we should ween ourselves from government and relegate the federal apparatus to the irrelevance—or even nonexistence—that it deserves.

According to Politico‘s Katherine Tully-McManus and Nicholas Wu, with 35 days of closure as of Tuesday, “Congress is on track this week to break an unflattering record: presiding over the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.” Big whoop. As attorney Timothy Snowball commented for the Pacific Legal Foundation during 2019’s similar budget standoff, “the vast majority of the federal government is still in operation, shutdown or no shutdown.”

The problem is that officials inevitably target closures so that the pain is most visible. Children crying at locked museum doors and federal workers complaining of delayed paychecks (which will be paid in full) generate pressure to open the funding taps and keep the federal machine functioning—though most of it continues cranking along. In recent days, the headline-grabbing tearjerker has been the effect of the funding impasse on SNAP benefits, better known as “food stamps,” which, after court orders and federal scrambling, have been partially funded for the many millions of Americans dependent on the program.

Really, it’s astonishing just how many Americans receive SNAP benefits. In 2012, the Mercatus Center’s Veronique de Rugy noted that “when the food stamp program was first expanded nationally in the 1970s, just 1 in 50 Americans participated.” But after years of loosened eligibility requirements by both the Bush (junior) and Obama administrations “food stamp enrollment increased and spending doubled, even as unemployment and the poverty level dropped modestly between 2007 and 2011.”

“The 2002 Farm Bill expanded eligibility to noncitizens, increased benefits for families with more children, adjusted benefits for inflation and made it easier to enroll,” continued de Rugy. “Further easing of eligibility requirements followed in the 2008 Farm Bill….Similarly, the 2009 stimulus bill scrapped limits on SNAP benefits to adults without children and raised the maximum benefit.”

Today, 12.3 percent of Americans—or roughly one in eight—receive SNAP benefits, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program. “The share of residents receiving SNAP benefits ranged from as high as 21.2 percent in New Mexico to as low as 4.8 percent in Utah.”

Using an anchored 2012 supplemental poverty measure, “poverty rates fell by more than half (61%) between 1967 to 2024 (falling from 25.8% in 1967 to 10.1% in 2024),” according to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. Rising government transfer payments are certainly part of that story. But real per capita GDP, in constant 2017 dollars, has also risen from $24,556 in 1967 to $69,499 today. As the country grows wealthier, more people have become dependent on the state to put food on the table. Its members get upset when political debates cause payment disruptions.

The government has created a client class.

Also upset this week are air travelers because, with paychecks delayed, many air traffic controllers are calling in sick. The shortage of controllers results in delays and canceled flights. Many travelers want the chaos over with and are pushing for lawmakers to resolve their differences and restore normality.

But why do air travelers and private airlines need the services of the federal government to get from one destination to another? That’s not the case everywhere.

“Canada’s federal government privatized air traffic control in 1996, transferring control (for a price of C$1.5 billion) to a private non-profit (Nav Canada), which became the world’s first fully privatized civil aviation navigation service,” George Mason University economics professor Vincent Geloso wrote in June of this year. Not incidentally, the Canadian federal government was suffering a severe budget crunch at the time. “Accident rates declined after having stagnated since the 1960s due in part to an impressive technological modernization effort. And despite modernization costs, user fees charged to aircraft operators actually declined by one-third.”

It would be very easy to make sure future government shutdowns don’t affect air travel by getting government out of the air traffic control (and security) business. Air travel would likely be more efficient as a result. Congress even considered a bill to that effect in 2017, which could be revived. Or the feds could delve into the work the Reason Foundation (which publishes Reason) has done on the issue.

All of this is to say that dependence on government is a choice—a bad choice. It destroys our independence and makes us vulnerable to government failures and disputes in the political process. I illustrate that point with SNAP and air traffic control because those are issues grabbing attention this week. But there are so many other areas into which government officials have intruded to convince us that they’re indispensable. The shutdown emphasizes the importance of reducing, if not eliminating the government’s role, in as many of those areas as possible.

We may need some government. But some government is far less than we have now when disruptions in the budget process affect one in eight Americans’ meal planning and prevent passenger jets from crossing the skies. The government should be doing less, subsidizing fewer people and businesses, and it certainly shouldn’t be encouraging a class of clients whose fortunes depend on politicians’ largesse.

CNN reports that “a small group of fed-up lawmakers in Washington are furiously trying to end the standoff as soon as this week” so the federal government can resume its suspended activities. But that’s the wrong approach. We need a real shutdown to make Americans go cold turkey. We need to rediscover our independence, kick the government habit, and learn how to live without Uncle Sugar.

We’ll eventually learn how much, if any, government we really need. For now, keep it closed.