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1st October 2025
07:35am BST
The US government has shut down for the first time since 2018 after a Senate vote on a spending bill failed to be passed.
This means many federal agency services are set to be affected while thousands could be furloughed or made redundant after Donald Trump threatened to lay off "a lot of people" if a shutdown happened.
It is the first time for almost seven years that the government has shut down in the US.
The shutdown comes after both the Republicans and Democrats failed to come to an agreement over a bill to extend government funding without other initiatives attached, known as a clean CR (continuing resolution).
While having a majority in both the House of Representatives and in the Senate, the Republicans only have 53 seats in the latter, needing 60 for a government funding bill to be passed (usually a majority is enough).
This means they needed seven Democrats to vote in favour and pass the bill, which the Democrats saw as an opportunity to lobby and try to advance their policy goals in health care which included reversing the Trump administration's cuts to Medicaid.
The Republicans decided they could not compromise on such demands so ultimately the bill was not passed, meaning funding could not be distributed to many federal agencies ahead of a new fiscal year.
Ultimately, this means many workers cannot be paid and many non-essential services shutdown, hence the name.
Such agencies include the Food assistance programme, federally-funded pre-school, the issuing of student loans, food inspections, national parks and museums while others could be partly affected.
Critical services that will not be affected include the FBI, CIA, air traffic control, the postal service and the national grid.
During the last shutdown in 2018, 340,000 of 800,000 federal workers were furloughed.
In response to the closure, both parties have blamed each other for the shutdown, with the White House posting an image of a timer captioned "Democrats shutdown."
Meanwhile, it wouldn't be 2025 without a respected and serious institution like the White House posting memes about the situation.
Posting to Instagram, the official account for the White House shared a video of Steve Carroll in The Office overlayed with the words "day in the life of a Democrat who was asked to keep the government open."
Senate majority leader John Thune, a Republican, accused the Democrats of taking federal workers "hostage".
In response, Senate minority leader and Democrat Chuck Schumer, said the Republicans' funding package "does absolutely nothing to solve the biggest health care crisis in America".
