Why we find ourselves on the precipice again and again … and again.
These days, the threat of a government shutdown is as commonplace as lawmakers skipping town for recess.
This congressional term alone, the US has faced fears of a government shutdown no fewer than four times as lawmakers have failed to agree on long-term funding bills and passed last-minute, short-term patches instead.
In 2019, the US saw its longest shutdown yet when former President Donald Trump tried to wield it as a political weapon in order to procure funding for his southern border wall. And overall, shutdowns took place more frequently in the 2010s than the prior decade.
For context, Congress must pass 12 funding bills each year that provide money for everything from the Department of Defense to the Food and Drug Administration. If they fail to do so by an end-of-September deadline, either they approve a short-term bill that buys them more time and keeps agencies funded or the government shuts down.
It’s now been almost six full months since the start of the fiscal year in October, and Congress has yet to approve multiple full-year appropriations bills. On Tuesday, lawmakers announced a deal to keep the government open and finally pass several of the remaining longer-term measures, potentially quelling shutdown fears for now.
Every time there’s another funding deadline, however, concerns about a potential shutdown ramp up. That’s because funding bills, like all legislation, are subject to growing polarization in Congress — and a faction of Republicans, in particular, benefits politically from threatening to shut down the government.
The causes of shutdowns have changed
Shutdowns aren’t totally new.
Modern-day shutdowns began in the 1980s after Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued an opinion stating that government agencies couldn’t keep operating if Congress hadn’t explicitly approved the funds they needed to do so. A handful of shutdowns happened in the 1970s as well, but they didn’t really close the government in the same way that current ones do.
Multiple shutdowns of the 1970s and ’80s also centered on specific disagreements over spending, such as line items in legislation, versus less related ideological arguments about policy. (Abortion funding, a crime bill and welfare expansion were all factors in different shutdowns, however.)
A major turning point in how shutdowns have been weaponized occurred in the 1990s. In December 1995, House Republicans, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, initiated a lengthy 21-day shutdown in order to make a point about budget reforms. At the time, they argued that President Bill Clinton should develop a budget based on more conservative projections from the Congressional Budget Office versus other estimates made by the White House Office of Management and Budget. This was notable because the standoff wasn’t just about a particular spending figure, but a broader policy disagreement.
The 1995–1996 shutdown was also widely viewed as harming Republicans, who held both the House and the Senate, by making them appear dysfunctional and unable to govern.
While Republicans only lost two House seats and added two Senate seats in the following election, Clinton was viewed as benefiting from the shutdown debacle and coasting to a landslide reelection victory, in part because of how it hurt the GOP’s image, Molly Ball wrote for the Atlantic.
There’s some debate about how much damage Republicans ultimately suffered. Seemingly scarred from the experience, however, they avoided a shutdown for nearly two decades afterward — until a wave of Tea Party members focused on fiscal responsibility were elected in 2010. In 2013, these members pushed for a 16-day government shutdown and said they wouldn’t approve spending bills unless they defunded the Affordable Care Act.
That shutdown heralded the beginning of our current era. Since 2013, there have been three shutdowns, and many more times when a shutdown was threatened.
Throughout this time, the GOP has explicitly used spending bills as leverage for other policy goals — building on the 2013 and 1996 precedents. In 2018, Democrats similarly used this strategy to urge action on immigration reforms. It was at the end of that year that former President Donald Trump called for Republicans to shut down the government if funding wasn’t approved for his border wall.
Trump’s public support for the 2018–2019 shutdown, which lasted 35 days and became the longest in US history, underscored how making these threats — and using them as evidence for their base voters that they’re fighting for their priorities — has become incentivized for Republicans.
The political motives for threatening shutdowns, briefly explained
All told, there have been 21 government shutdowns over the past 50 years. They’re more likely to take place when there’s a split Congress, or when the party that controls Congress is different from the party holding the White House.
In recent years, partisanship has only gotten worse, increasing lawmakers’ incentives to use shutdown threats and other disruptive tactics. Because of this polarization, lawmakers have become more willing to play to their base voters, with the hopes of rallying them for the next election. And due to gerrymandering in states like Florida and Tennessee, for example, Republicans now have more districts that are GOP-leaning.
“Members of the House, particularly, have less incentive to compromise with their Democratic colleagues because they’re more worried about a primary challenge from their flank than they are losing their seat to the other party,” George Washington University political management professor Todd Belt tells Vox.
Between the two parties, Republicans are also more likely to use these tactics than Democrats because they’re in line with conservative political commitments to cutting spending. As a result, the furthest-right members of the GOP — such as the Freedom Caucus — are often among the most vocal in threatening a shutdown over issues such as immigration.
Additionally, there’s some evidence that lawmakers are no longer being punished at the ballot box for using such disruptive tactics. Voters may be unhappy when a shutdown is happening, but they might potentially forget about it by the time the next election rolls around. For example, Republicans were blamed in polls for the major shutdowns in 2019 and 2013, but there’s little evidence it harmed them in the subsequent national elections, according to NBC News.
“We live in an increasingly noisy political environment. We have more crises and more breaking news and a louder political environment than we did 10, 20, 30 years ago,” says Bipartisan Policy Center senior analyst Andrew Lautz. “You could see backlash electorally, but … I’m not sure how much difference these budgeting fights make at the polls.”
Congress likes to procrastinate
Congress rarely passes funding bills on time, and the reliance on short-term bills — also known as continuing resolutions, or CRs — is part of the reason it often feels like we’re regularly on the verge of a shutdown. Since a short-term bill might only last a few weeks or months, any time one expires, the country risks shutting down.
This term, Congress has already used multiple CRs, renewing them in November, January, and February. “I’m done normalizing this dysfunction,” first-term Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) griped last September when asked to vote for a short-term patch.
Because of polarization, Congress is also passing fewer bills, on average, over time. As a result, appropriations bills are more contentious because lawmakers may try to add in other policy riders, knowing a funding bill is guaranteed to pass.
“I think that one consequence of it getting harder to legislate generally is this idea that the discretionary appropriations process ends up bearing more of Congress’s political conflicts than it used to, because of the sense that this is the only thing we’re going to do,” Molly Reynolds, a procedural expert at Brookings, tells Vox.
Shutdowns still cause real damage
Even though they’ve been normalized, shutdowns and the threat of shutdowns aren’t good.
They’ve cost the economy billions of dollars in recent years, and they create significant uncertainty for federal workers. “The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the five-week partial government shutdown in 2018 and 2019 reduced economic output by $11 billion in the following two quarters — including $3 billion that the U.S. economy never regained,” a report from Senate Democrats noted.
“They only serve to hurt the economy, they scramble federal departments and agencies, and they lead to a waste of federal dollars,” says Lautz. Even when a threatened shutdown doesn’t occur, agencies still have to prepare for the possibility, taking time and resources away from implementing policies and programs they’d otherwise be focused on.
Shutdowns also have an outsize impact on government employees. During a shutdown, tens of thousands of federal workers are furloughed or forced to work without pay, and prominent services like immigration courts, food inspections, and National Park access get curtailed or delayed. Additionally, thousands of federal contractors may never recoup back pay from shutdowns after they end. And certain services are left dangerously understaffed.
Despite these consequences, lawmakers still seem plenty comfortable bringing the country to the brink again and again and again.
Author Rhaina Cohen on what we can learn from people who choose a friend as a life partner.
We live in a culture that privileges romance. Specifically, marriage.
It’s not just that the fairy tales we grow up with end in some couple’s “happily ever after.” The reign of romance is in our laws, too. In America, married people get over 1,000 legal benefits that single people can’t access.
That’s … weird! Why should society assume that romantic love is the ultimate form of commitment? For some people, the most meaningful and long-lasting relationship they’ll have is actually a deep friendship.
What if society were structured so that people who choose a friend as a life partner — people in a platonic partnership — could raise kids together, share health insurance with each other, and make medical decisions for one another, rather than being dismissed as “just friends”?
To explore these questions, I invited Rhaina Cohen onto The Gray Area. She’s the author of the new national bestseller, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center. This deeply reported book follows several pairs of platonic partners, who unsettle societal assumptions about which relationships are supposed to scaffold our lives. It argues that we’re undermining romantic relationships by expecting too much of them while diminishing friendships by expecting too little of them.
Rhaina is also a personal friend of mine, so we had the opportunity to get a bit meta in our podcast discussion about friendship. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Sigal Samuel
A major project of your book is to take these ideas that we’re all familiar with — friendship, romance, marriage — and historicize them. By that I mean you try to show readers that these ideas have actually changed a lot over the centuries. It’s not like they just fell from the heavens in their current form. So tell me some of the surprising things that the historical record has revealed to you about friendship.
Rhaina Cohen
We could start in the present, where we think about friendship now as a relationship that is kind of an add-on, not necessarily the crux of a good life, and as a relationship that is private rather than one that is publicly recognized or celebrated. And it’s a relationship that’s lower on the hierarchy than family, than romantic relationships, even career.
But if you look back in time, the picture is actually really different. You can go back to the story of David and Jonathan in the Hebrew Bible. You can go back to ancient Roman thinkers and how they talked about their friends as “the other half of my soul,” or “the better half of my soul.” The kind of language that would seem more like what you would say for your romantic partner who is supposed to be at the top of your hierarchy.
And there were practices in the past, like a ritual called sworn brotherhood, where men would walk into a church, put their hands one on top of the other on the Gospels, and have a priest say a blessing over them that made them committed to each other for life. Sometimes these men were buried with each other rather than with their wives. So it’s making friendship public and equal to, if not greater than, marriage. It’s turning friendship into an enduring kinship relationship. And there is this emotional experience and adoration and effusion that we don’t necessarily think of as appropriate in friendship right now.
This kind of sworn brotherhood relationship was something that you could see throughout medieval England and in the Byzantine Empire. You could also find versions of this practice among monks in other parts of the world, like China.
Sigal Samuel
Fast-forward to modern-day America and we see an extremely sharp contrast. So how did we get to this thinner, more impoverished view of friendship that we have today?
Rhaina Cohen
There are basically two trends that braid together. One has to do with the way marriage has been understood over time, and the other has to do with what’s possible within friendship.
Marriage used to be much more of a pragmatic institution. People would enter into it to merge their families and their wealth, not so much for love, let alone finding a soulmate. And there was, of course, tons of inequality — women until kind of recently were property of their husbands — so it really is not much of a surprise that people tended to find much more emotional intimacy in their same sex-friendships, which were more egalitarian than in their marriages.
But starting 150 years ago or so, it’s much more common for love to be seen as an essential part of marriage. And then in the last half century, you have even higher expectations of marriage, where people want their spouse to be their best friend, which doesn’t leave as much room for friendship.
And then alongside this, by the turn of the 20th century or so, emotional and physical intimacy between same-sex friends became suspect, as you have the introduction of the category of homosexuality and any kind of same-sex sexual interaction being seen as really stigmatized.
So you don’t get to have this kind of closeness, where women were exchanging locks of hair with their friends, where same-sex friends would share beds together because that was a norm at the time. There was really this crowding out of the emotional and physical intimacy of friendship. There was just a lot of fear around being labeled as homosexual.
Sigal Samuel
In the book, when you talk about friendship versus romance and love versus lust, you get into the neurobiology a bit. Tell me what the science reveals about the difference between friendship and romance or love and lust.
Rhaina Cohen
I think most people today, in a place like the US, assume that these two things go together, that love is impossible to have without lust. So many of the friends that I write about in this book, who clearly love each other, are kind of incomprehensible to the world around them, because everybody wants to imagine that they must have some kind of sexual desire for one another.
But in fact, there’s research that shows that the drive for love or attachment is different from the sex drive. And while they might go together, they don’t always. Different chemicals and networks in the brain are involved in the attachment versus the sex drive. So, hormones like androgens and estrogens are involved in sex, whereas when you’re forming a close attachment or love relationship, we’re getting a hit of oxytocin and dopamine. This helps explain how it is possible to feel passion and infatuation, which you might connect to an attachment relationship or a love relationship, without having that sexual drive.
The researcher who’s done a lot of this work is Lisa Diamond, who’s at the University of Utah. And it helped her understand a bunch of women she had interviewed and traced over the course of decades, who had a friendship that she talks about as a kind of in-between world, where they did not seem to be denying any kind of sexual desire that they had for another person — they just didn’t feel it. And yet they had more intensity than we think of as being reasonable in “just” friendship.
Sigal Samuel
When I think about the implications of the neurobiology for how we’re living, I get the image in my mind of Lego blocks. I’m wondering if we should think of different relationships as structures made of these Lego blocks that we can assemble, disassemble, reassemble into different configurations over time as our needs shift.
At one point, someone might be your housemate and your sexual partner and your co-parent and your closest supporter in times of crisis. And at another point in life, maybe that’s not the right fit, and they might be just one or two of those things. Maybe that makes sense if a different neurochemical thing is happening at a different point. Maybe we should have more okayness about that shift.
Rhaina Cohen
I think a familiar version of this for a lot of people is imagining a very stereotypical romantic relationship over the course of decades that starts off with sex being really an important part of it, and then people have kids and they don’t have time or energy to have much of a sexual relationship. And that may or may not be an issue for the couple — they might feel mutually okay about that.
We have a stereotype in our society that older people are not that sexual, which I don’t subscribe to, but there is some understanding that a marriage can still be really meaningful even if it becomes more companionate over time, and it’s built more on emotional intimacy and the sex piece is less important.
So there’s already recognition that you can have that kind of modularity in marriages. And I think this can apply to other kinds of relationships, too.
Sigal Samuel
There is this great term in your book, “compulsory coupledom,” to describe this fixation in our society on romantic relationships and particularly on marriage. And that’s not just a cultural thing. The government seems to really promote and push marriage. How did that come to be, historically? Why does the state want to be so up in my business — and should it get out?
Rhaina Cohen
A lot of the rights and benefits that are attached to marriage really develop around the New Deal, when there are these new government programs. A good proxy to make sure that everyone is covered in a society where almost everybody is married is to use marriage as a criterion for something like dependency. So it’s a way to cover women for retirement benefits, to make sure they’re not in poverty when they themselves are not working.
Basically, marriage is a shortcut to tell you something about caregiving and dependency, and for the state to encourage people to have those sorts of relationships. We need people to be caring for each other.
Sigal Samuel
That’s also because it serves the state, right? That means fewer people on government rolls.
Rhaina Cohen
Fewer people on government rolls, yes. But also there is value to people raising children, and there is a value to people caring for somebody who is sick. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have other people do it, but it’s a way of recognizing that it is important societally for that to happen, that that’s not just free.
Sigal Samuel
To this day in the US, marriage comes with this huge package of rights and benefits, while friendships, no matter how deep or committed they are, get basically nothing. To me, that seems pretty silly because functionally these deep friendships are often doing a lot of the same stuff — the stuff that the state wants to see happen, like caregiving.
What would be the most effective way to grant unmarried people the same rights as married couples have? Do we need a legal alternative to marriage?
Rhaina Cohen
I want to pinpoint a word you used, which was “function.” So much of the law is built around the form or the structure of relationships and not paying as much attention to the function. But there’s been, certainly in family law, a shift to look more at the function. One of the arguments that I saw from several legal scholars is that it is caregiving and economic interdependence that the state has a vested interest in supporting.
So, you can do an inventory where you’re only keeping the rights and benefits that pertain to caregiving and economic interdependence — for example, worker’s compensation for a surviving spouse, which is compensating for lost income in a relationship where people are economically interdependent — and use those as criteria [for deciding who gets certain benefits] rather than marriage. Because marriage is not, especially in this day and age, as good of a proxy as it used to be. So you can basically strip marriage down and extend benefits on a different basis.
I think simpler options are just having people designate a person who is the default stop for making major decisions in their lives. That could be something as simple as a form that you fill out when you’re at the DMV or at the post office.
And then the final option would be the legal alternative to marriage that doesn’t have the romantic connotation attached to it. Colorado has this law called a “designated beneficiary agreement.” It’s different from marriage, where you have this giant bundle of more than 1,000 rights and benefits. It’s a little bit more à la carte: There are two sheets of paper, very simple, 16 different rights and benefits, and you can check off which ones you want to give and receive from the other person. That kind of template could be used in other places that would allow people in nonmarital relationships to ensure that the person who is making medical decisions on their behalf is the one that they want, and the person who is handling end-of-life care is the person that they want, and so on.
It is okay for one person to not be the right person for everything. I’m very aware of my weaknesses, and it would be a relief to me to know that there might be another person for my husband to turn to for certain kinds of things that I’m not the best at.
Sigal Samuel
When you look ahead to 20 years from now, what route do you think policy could take that would actually work to accommodate the committed friendships that we do see on the ground?
Rhaina Cohen
There are already legal alternatives to marriage that are happening in the US, and there are groups that are really pushing for this. In Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts, there are already domestic partnerships that you can sign up for that actually allow more than two people to sign up. They were explicitly made so that they didn’t have a romantic connotation, so friends could take advantage of them. The first legislation that would prevent discrimination on the basis of family structure was also passed in that part of the country. And on Valentine’s Day this year, basically the same kind of legislation was introduced in Oakland and in Berkeley.
So I already see people moving in this direction of trying to put other options on the table. And what I think is promising about the Colorado law is that it’s very cheap, and it’s easy to get, and it also has at least some amount of customizability. I think something that has that mix could be helpful in the future. But let’s talk again in 20 years, and we’ll see.
Reddit could become the next meme stock — or flop.
Reddit, the launchpad for many meme stocks, could now become one: The social media giant makes its debut on Wall Street this week in one of the most highly anticipated initial public offerings of the year.
The nearly 20-year-old company is seeking to raise up to $748 million in its IPO on March 21, putting its valuation at about $6.4 billion. It’s the first time that a major social media company has gone public since Snap (i.e., Snapchat) in 2017.
It will sell approximately 22 million shares priced at $31 to $34 each under the ticker symbol “RDDT.” The company is reserving about 1.76 million shares for top Reddit users, people who have taken a significant number of “moderator actions” or who have high “karma” scores, a measure of community engagement with their posts. They will have the option to buy in at that initial price early and then sell as soon as the IPO happens.
That perk is unavailable to most investors, who usually have to hold stock for a mandatory six-month period after an IPO. Reddit is attempting to curry favor with a user base that hasn’t taken kindly to the company’s past efforts to monetize the site enough to turn a profit.
Reddit says there are many reasons for people to buy in, according to a prospectus released ahead of the IPO. While the company isn’t yet profitable, revenue grew by 21 percent to $804 million and losses declined 43 percent to $90.8 million in 2023. It’s hoping to offer more advertisers access to its 73 million daily active users, many of whom come to Reddit looking for product recommendations. Advertisers could then target users based on their interests. The company hopes that microtargeting will allow it to continue growing its revenue, even if digital ad spending remains down.
Reddit also recently signed a data licensing deal with Google, reportedly valued at about $60 million a year, to help train the search engine’s artificial intelligence models on the conversations happening on Reddit.
The AI boom is a boost to Reddit’s debut on Wall Street — but its plans for profitability risk angering its users by undermining the very reasons for the site’s success. Reddit has thrived as a relatively egalitarian, all-in-one online forum. In contrast to Facebook or Twitter, most users remain anonymous and the site has historically had a relaxed attitude toward content moderation. But recent pivots ahead of the IPO toward a more investor-focused strategy, such as cracking down on third-party apps, has already led to significant backlash from the user base.
Now Reddit has to convince its users that they stand to benefit from any of the features that might make the company attractive to investors. If it can’t, it risks another mutiny.
“I think there will be rough waters to navigate early on, but that seems normal for most companies, especially those with boisterous customers,” said Kyle Stanford, lead venture capital analyst at PitchBook. “This is a natural progression.”
What the IPO means for Reddit as a company
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said last year that it was “time we grow up and behave like an adult company.”
Reddit is one of the last major Web 2.0 social networks to go public: Meta (then Facebook) went public in 2012, X (then Twitter) in 2013 before Elon Musk took it private again, Tinder parent company Match in 2015, and Pinterest in 2019.
Going public means that Reddit will have new fiduciary obligations to its shareholders, which demand that the company try to maximize its profits. The company is already taking additional steps to try to further monetize the platform.
The new Google data licensing deal is a big one, especially given that licensing has only been a small share of Reddit’s revenue up until this point. The advent of AI large language models like Google Gemini has opened up new opportunities in licensing. While AI search crawlers have been scraping data from websites including Reddit to develop their models without permission from those sites, lawsuits have recently put that practice under threat, so Google has been eager to secure licensing deals with major publishers.
If Reddit were going public right now as a standalone social media and advertising business, Stanford said it would be a “tough market to IPO in, and we should assume the price range would be lower if that was the case.”
“AI is a big boost to the IPO, and probably a reason the company is choosing now to IPO,” he said, adding that the company’s hope is that it will “boost its prospects and boost the interest from investors that it can continue its revenue growth and move toward profitability.”
The Federal Trade Commission, however, has opened an inquiry into the Google deal. Though Reddit says it has not engaged in any anticompetitive practices, it acknowledged in an updated investor prospectus that the probe could lead to “substantial costs” and “require us to change our policies or practices, divert management and other resources from our business, or otherwise adversely impact our business, results of operations, financial condition, and prospects.”
Last year, Reddit also started charging third-party developers to access its API, a tool that allows the social media network to share information with other software. It generated a huge backlash among Redditors, with thousands of volunteer moderators shutting down their subreddits in protest for days or longer. Popular third-party apps that have a unique user interface to browse Reddit on mobile — like Narwhal 2 or Infinity — used to be free, but now have to charge for subscriptions as a result of the new API restrictions. Other third-party developers have decided to just shut down their apps.
But Huffman never budged. He told NPR at the time that Reddit had been “subsidizing other [businesses] for free for a long time. We’re stopping that. That is not a negotiable point.”
Reddit has also begun to take steps to attract more advertisers. That has meant toughening content moderation. And it has promised further investment in its contextual and interest-based ad targeting technology introduced last year.
“If the data licensing is able to grow significantly and reduce the pressure on increasing advertising, that is probably the best option,” Stanford said.
Despite all of its preparations for going public, it seems like Reddit is tempering its expectations for the IPO. Last week, it cut pay incentives for Huffman if the stock hit a $25 billion valuation after IPO, suggesting that the company isn’t as optimistic as it once might have been about hitting that astronomical number.
How Redditors are reacting
All eyes are on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets ahead of its parent site’s IPO, which could provide an early window into how the user base and investors are responding.
The subreddit has previously made and ruined fortunes, temporarily driving up the price of stock in down-and-out companies like GameStop, the movie theater chain AMC, and Y2K smartphone maker BlackBerry.
In some of those cases, Redditors’ goal was to orchestrate a short squeeze — forcing institutional investors who were betting against the stock to buy it back at a higher price to cover their losses. (They also just thought it was funny.) For example, r/wallstreetbets (with a later endorsement from Elon Musk) propelled the price of GameStop stock from under $5 a share in January 2021 to as high as $500 by the end of the month. The brokerage platform Robinhood eventually made the controversial decision to temporarily shut down trading of the stock, citing market volatility and regulatory requirements.
Gamestonk!! https://t.co/RZtkDzAewJ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 26, 2021