On October 1, Congress allowed the government to close and turned poor and working people into bargaining chips in a budget fight. When Democrats pushed to protect the health insurance subsidies that keep millions covered under the Affordable Care Act, Republicans refused and demanded a “clean bill,” stalling efforts to safeguard coverage for families who rely on those subsidies.
Six weeks later, the longest shutdown in U.S. history is over. That’s a relief for the workers getting paid again and the families whose benefits are restarting, but it’s hard to call this a win for either party. A government that puts its own people through that kind of pain and uncertainty has already failed a deeper test.
People call this dysfunction, but it’s darker than that. It’s a measure of how far those in power will go to squeeze the people with the least leverage and how quietly the rest of us will watch.
Shutdowns always reveal who feels the government’s failure first, and it’s never the ones holding power. It’s the families who rely on SNAP to eat or WIC to buy formula while everyone else argues about politics. Scripture teaches, “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.” If that’s the measure of a country, this shutdown gave us an answer we can’t be proud of.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr once said, “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politics, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.” Conscious tells me the same thing now. We should never have to celebrate the reopening of a government that never should have been closed.
A Shutdown That Shuts Out the People
Offices that went dark for six weeks are reopening; federal workers are back at their jobs, and families can expect paychecks again. Things returning to normal are good for the country, but reopening the government will not fix what caused the shutdown in the first place.
More than 4,000 federal employees were furloughed or laid off. SNAP, which feeds 42 million people a month, ran on borrowed time. The Department of Agriculture warned that states were within days of running out of money to pay even reduced benefits. WIC, which serves 6.7 million women, infants, and children and covers roughly forty percent of all infants in this country, faced a similar risk if the shutdown continued for an extended period. These programs aren’t charity; they’re the line between hunger and stability for millions of families.
Nearly 24 million people have Affordable Care Act coverage this year, a record high. More than 90 percent receive tax credits that make it affordable, the same subsidies Democrats tried to protect, and Republicans refused to extend in negotiations. The final deal ended the shutdown but left those subsidies to expire at the end of the year, with only a promise of a Senate vote in December. Six weeks of political gamesmanship bought us just 80 days of peace – until January 30, 2026, when this deal expires. The government’s role is to safeguard people; not strip away the resources they rely on to survive, especially the most vulnerable.
The Treasury Department furloughed the entire staff of the CDFI Fund — people whose work moves capital into neighborhoods Wall Street rarely sees. Their absence stalled housing deals, delayed small-business loans, and left grocery projects in food deserts without financing. All those employees have now been brought back, which is welcome news, but the damage didn’t vanish with their return. Every week of delay meant projects postponed, partners waiting, and communities pushed further behind. Washington may call that recovery, but for the people affected, it still feels like lost time that no one will make up. All that hardship bought Congress a headline about bipartisanship and a few weeks of breathing room. Both parties were tired of the criticism and needed an off-ramp, but relief born of exhaustion isn’t leadership —it’s self-preservation. The government may have reopened again, but public trust has not recovered from it.
Policy Decisions Rewriting the Meaning of Democracy
The same logic that made the shutdown possible, that some people’s pain is acceptable collateral, is alive in another branch of government. This fall, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Callais v. Louisiana, a case that could decide how much of the Voting Rights Act still has teeth. Section 2 of the Act bars states from drawing maps that weaken the voting power of Black Americans and other communities of color.
The Court has hinted it may narrow how race can be considered in redistricting, a move that would weaken what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. If that happens, it won’t stop in Louisiana. It could trigger a domino effect across the South where the electorate is changing faster than those in power are willing to admit. Analysts estimate that weakening Section 2 could shift control of up to 19 House seats, districts where voters of color could lose the ability to elect someone who actually listens to them.
If the Court rules that Section 2 no longer guarantees fair maps, it will send a message about where this country is headed; that even the right to be counted is conditional, and political power can be rationed like everything else.
The Consequences of Silence Will Reach Us All
I’ve spent my career believing that access to capital and access to power are linked. When people can’t vote, they can’t hold the officials accountable for cutting their programs. When those programs disappear, communities lose the leverage to rebuild them. Both the shutdown and Callais test the same question – how much can be taken from people without wealth before they stop believing they ever had a claim to begin with?
Those in power are testing how far they can go in narrowing who counts and who eats, who votes and who belongs. They can’t pull it off without our help or without the rest of us tuning out, scrolling past, and learning to live with it. They keep drawing red and blue lines through a working class that shares the same worries about rent, healthcare, and debt, while convincing each side that the other is to blame. The more divided we stay, the easier it is for them to keep control.
The top one percent of Americans now holds roughly a third of the nation’s wealth, which is more than the bottom 90 percent combined and that disparity isn’t an accident. It’s designed to protect those who are already economically secure and make everyone else fight for what’s left. Lyndon Johnson said it plainly back in the sixties: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.” That trick still works today. The story looks new on the surface, but it’s the same play underneath.
Like the frog in the pot, we’re being cooked slowly – rights, wages, and dignity one degree at a time. Each shutdown, court decision, and budget cut turns the dial higher until it almost feels like nothing. Maybe you think these occurrences won’t affect you if you’ve got a degree, a good job, and a mortgage. It’s easy to think that these battles only fall on poor people, rural people, and people who didn’t plan, but power always starts its testing at the edges. Once it learns what it can take from them, it moves inward — to the lawyer in Atlanta with good benefits, the entrepreneur in Charlotte who built a business with help from a CDFI, and the Black family in Houston still trying to believe fairness is earned. You may not feel the heat yet, but if these shifts continue, it’s only a matter of time before they reach your community, your rights, and your daily life.
The government reopened after the longest shutdown in our nation’s history, but that isn’t the real measure of democracy. What matters is whether it can stop creating these crises in the first place. Will this shutdown serve as a wakeup call for us to pay attention before the next one hits? Because once the water boils, it’s already too late, and the people who turn up the heat will say the temperature feels just right.