Raise your hand if you’ve heard (or uttered) a version of this gripe: “All this partisanship nowadays — why can’t things be like they were in the era of Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill?” Reagan was a Republican president and O’Neill the Democratic House speaker he had to deal with, the story goes, but the two were great friends who put politics aside and the government ran smoothly.
Fact check: There were more government shutdowns during the Reagan years than under all the presidents since then combined.
There were eight under Reagan and seven since, according to the Congressional Research Service and news reports compiled by The Washington Post. Even if the current impasse leads to a government shutdown next week, the Reagan presidency will still have as many as the rest of them put together.
There are, of course, two giant asterisks to this: 1) The shutdowns in the Reagan years were short, some lasting only hours, not even enough time to hang a closed sign at the entrance to a national park; and 2) All of these shutdowns were the result of a 1980 memo from a Democratic attorney general.
Before this memo, the federal government occasionally ran out of funding before a new budget had been passed, and … nothing happened. The government just kept functioning, federal workers kept clocking in, food stamps were still issued, and park rangers still managed the nation’s public lands, under the reasonable assumption that eventually funding would come through and the “funding gap” would be filled.
Then, in the waning days of the Carter administration in 1980, the president and Congress got in a fight over the Federal Trade Commission. The agency, which protects consumers and supports antitrust law, needed funding approved for the new fiscal year, and key members of Congress, who were being pressured by corporate lobbyists, refused to do it unless the FTC’s regulation powers were blunted.
Carter asked his attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti, what the law said about what to do if and when the money ran out. Ever the lawyer, Civiletti dove into a century of obscure legislation and came up waving the Antideficiency Act of 1870. Its language was “plain and unambiguous,” he wrote to Carter: If the FTC ran out of money, it could not incur new expenses and would have to shut down.
Months later, when a much bigger funding gap loomed, Civiletti reiterated his stance in a new memo, but he also built in a bit of a hedge: Yes, the whole federal government would have to shut down, he advised, except for the work essential to the “safety of human life or the protection of property.”