The shutdown is rough on a lot of people. There’s no denying it.
People looking at the political upsides of a long shutdown may or may not be correct in their opinion of where the political fallout may lie – perhaps it will auger to be better for the Democrats or better for the Republicans, electorally, in the long run; we don’t yet know.
But either way, there’s no denying that many people are suffering as a result of it.
So, while this isn’t the biggest immediate issue to resolve, it is indeed the biggest longterm issue: what can be done to reduce the harm of future shutdowns?
It’s not as hard to figure out as it may seem, but it requires a type of thinking that has been discouraged during this past century of government growth, a century in which we’ve always been told that the government is – if not the only solution to every problem – at least a potential solution, and often the best one. This is rarely true, but it’s been the prevailing public mindset for over 110 years.
Perhaps that mindset is finally on shaky enough ground to be challenged. Hopefully, perhaps, in the nick of time.
Let’s begin with air travel. The TSA is federally operated, and we need them to provide some level of (questionable) security at our airports. But airport and airline security was once primarily the responsibility of the airports and airlines themselves, and it could be again. It’s only been federalized for a generation.
We could privatize that function easily; make air travel security the job of the airports and airlines. Problem solved.
More challenging is the issue of the air traffic controllers. This is a unified operation across the country, with each air traffic control office responsible for not only safety in the air – and the safety of takeoffs and landings as well – in their own region but also nationally, as flight paths go back and forth.
A strong case can be made that they should be federal, but they could be funded independently, or enjoy longterm funding separate from the annual budgeting process. Congress could tackle that worthy challenge; they’ve done it with less important issues.
How about other aspects of travel? Americans visit national parks, federal office buildings, federal museums. The visitor centers at many of these are shut down, even while access to parks may be open. But what is a trip to Washington DC without a visit to one of the many Smithsonian museums? What is a trip to Mount Rushmore without a visit to the main viewing center? Is it even safe to tour Yellowstone without the full complement of park rangers on hand?
Again, even while ownership may have to remain federal for good reason, there’s no reason these staffs couldn’t also be independently funded, tied to the revenues of entrance fees and leased concessions at these popular sites. Perhaps free access to such places is considered an important part of the American experience, but a public debate on the issue of its cost might be a worthy subject, every generation or so, if only to remind the voters that none of the benefits of government are truly free.
Private companies suffer in a shutdown too, as every company dependent on the federal government – for anything at all – is sure to lose either profits or time, or both, because of the reduced staff of government.
Restaurants, caterers, and common carriers who serve federal offices – who have often built their very business models on the stability of demand offered by a government clientele – now see weeks or even months of diminished commerce, often needing to lay off their own private sector staff as a result.
They won’t like the solution, but it’s an obvious one: if you don’t want to be at risk during a government shutdown, reduce your dependence on government clients. Reach out to the private sector, and support public policies that enrich the private sector, rather than policies that enrich the government. Everyone should be more invested in the growth of the private sector anyway; any issue that misguides the reward system away from private sector growth should be recognized as anathema to a capitalist country.
And what of the countless businesses now at a standstill as they await government approvals, government permits, government licenses? At any given moment, there are geological surveys leading to investors digging wells, planning mines, applying for grazing rights, mineral rights, water rights. Every day, there are businesses that need government approval to launch a new product, to expand a plant, to grow a market. Their plans are at a standstill as they await the return of CBP and the EPA, F&W and the BLM, and so many more three letter acronyms of our bloated federal government to get back to their desks and issue those authorizations.
There’s a solution: reduce the number of things that need special permission from the federal government. The feds have been throwing monkeywrenches in the American economy for generations, monkeywrenches that grind everything to a stop year-round, and a federal shutdown just makes this already awful process worse than usual.
The solution here too is easy and obvious, and the Trump administration is working on it, but if the Democrats ever get back in, they’ll put back all the monkeywrenches that the current Trump team will have spent four years taking out.
We need Congress to lock in legal roadblocks for good, to stop future administrations from returning to this morass of bureaucratic petrification ever again.
But our biggest concerns in the daily press are for the two most obvious, most talked about problems of the shutdown: the hundreds of thousands of government employees going without paychecks, and the millions of recipients of federal welfare going without SNAP replenishment and similar entitlements.
Well, there will always be some federal employees, but do there need to be this many? And as the good Lord said in the Good Book, “The poor you will always have with you,” but of them too we can ask, do there need to be this many?
We can shrink the federal government. There is no good reason for a constitutional government to have millions of civilian employees. The more it shrinks – the more federal employees get jobs in the private sector – the fewer people will be disadvantaged by a federal shutdown.
And we can shrink the welfare state. Tens of millions of welfare beneficiaries – due to massive cracks in the system – are illegal aliens, people who don’t belong here in the first place, let alone on the welfare rolls. And tens of millions more are citizens who are unnecessarily dependent. With a stronger economy, there would be jobs for all but the most handicapped among them. The more we strengthen the economy, strengthen the border, and strengthen our work requirements, the fewer people will be dependent on the welfare state; the fewer will be hurt by shutdowns like this one.
None of this is rocket science. None of this should be revelatory to anyone studying American politics and governance. But these problems are all things that the American voter has been raised to accept without question.
It’s time for the American voter to demand the shrinkage of the federal leviathan, in order to enjoy the resultant expansion of the private sector that our nation – and the world – so desperately needs.
Our Founding Fathers gave us a nation of ultimate economic opportunity, through a severely limited government. As we have deviated from their plan, our economic opportunities have shrunken accordingly.
It’s time long past time to return to our roots as a free and economically healthy nation.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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Great Post.
Interesting (for me) that active duty military pay isn’t considered ‘essential’ during this time….. if our military isn’t worth of being paid during a shutdown, who is? Having to resort to billionaires to make up pay shortfalls? Thankful someone willing to do so.
Air traffic controllers – same. How can they not be essential?
TSA – agree they could be much more efficient and effective as a non-government run agency.
Our priorities of who is necessary and who isn’t necessary in the federal system are backwards. Time for a return to ‘square one’ to figure out what is baseline necessary for federal government what is simply become over-regulation and unnecessary staffing for departments that don’t mean that much for our everyday lives (looking at you, Dept. of Ed).