“That government is best which governs least.” – often attributed to Henry David Thoreau, yet its origin is unclear

You may have heard the federal government is shut down. At least it was when I wrote this.

Of course this means your social media timeline is going to have a few obligatory jokes about how we are now within the plot of the 2013 horror movie “The Purge” where government enforces no laws for a short time, essentially making all crime legal.

Don’t dig out your old blunderbuss from the shed just yet, though. We are still a few steps away from going there.

So what does the shutdown mean for us, and how did we get here? I decided to explain using the oldest trick in the journalism playbook – answering the questions of who, what, when, where, why and how.

Let us start with what. A government shutdown is most likely to take place when Congress has not authorized the U.S. Treasury to release funds for agencies to operate.

The Constitution requires Congress to pass a budget for each fiscal year stating how much money every government agency can spend along with some parameters saying how the money can be spent.

Next is when. The new fiscal year began October 1, and no budget has been passed, so we are in a shutdown. The length of this shutdown is anyone’s guess.

Now let’s move to who. Congress has to pass a budget, but congressional Republicans and Democrats have been unable to reach an agreement for what the 2025-2026 budget will be.

The who is also employees of the federal government who are not considered essential for government to function. They are currently furloughed without pay until a budget can be passed.

Ultimately, the who will be the public as taxpayers will not be receiving services they expect their tax dollars to provide.

So how do we have any government operations without a budget? Currently, the federal government is only allowed to function on what is considered the minimum level possible.

Previous legal opinions and a 1982 congressional update to the Antideficiency Act allows government to continue operations on matters involving “the safety of human life or the protection of property.”

This allows the military to continue to protect the country from attack and Social Security payments to continue to go out.

An October 1 article from Reuters does a good job explaining this through the lens of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The department will continue to perform food inspections, as they are considered essential for public safety, but it will not continue to accept and process farm loans or issue weather-related disaster payments during the shutdown.

What about the where? Obviously, the majority of federal offices are located in and around Washington, D.C., but there are branches of many of those offices located throughout the country.

Your state and local governments pass their own budgets separate from the federal government, so they should not be impacted much unless the shutdown drags out for months instead of weeks and federal grant money dries up.

Finally, we come to the why. Congressional Republicans appear to be united behind the idea of passing a continuing resolution. This provides each agency with the exact same amount of funding as it had in the previous budget until a new budget can be passed.

Congressional Democrats are hearing from their political base that they want the party to stand up to President Donald Trump and show some fight.

They have chosen to withhold their support for a budget solution until Republicans agree to negotiate a deal to renew tax breaks for lower-income earners who purchase their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. These tax breaks are set to expire at the end of 2025.

Republican leadership said their party is willing to have those discussions with Democrats, but the budget has to be passed first. Democrats, being in the minority in both the U.S. House and Senate, view holding up the budget to be their best bargaining chip on the health insurance issue.

Politically, Republicans appear to have the high ground. The threat of a filibuster in the Senate is the only thing holding back the budget’s passage.

Already two Democratic senators and one independent senator who usually votes with the Democrats have broken rank and voted with Republicans for a continuing resolution, which should help Republicans paint the remaining Democratic opposition as obstinate and unreasonable.

Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail sooner rather than later. Maybe have an idea where your blunderbuss is just in case they don’t.