The U.S. government has shut down for the first time since 2018, as federal funding expired at 12:01 a.m. ET on Wednesday.
While shutdowns are rare, they have occurred more often in recent decades.
Congress has walked up to the edge of a shutdown numerous times in recent years, most recently in March, when the Senate passed a bill hours before the deadline. Funding expired for a few hours until President Donald Trump signed the bill into law, but the general operation of the government was not affected.
Prolonged shutdowns of more than a day or a few days have been rare. The most recent was also the longest one in U.S. history, when a disagreement over funding for Trump’s border wall closed the government for 34 full days in December 2018 into January 2019.
Since 1976, the U.S. government has shut down 20 times. And while no shutdowns occurred from 1995 to 2013, there have been three in the 12 years since then.
