For those who believe the breakdown of American democracy has no cost beyond the aggravation of the citizenry, consider the figure $4 billion.
That's the minimum, measurable cost to taxpayers of the most recent three partial government shutdowns, according to a bipartisan report released Tuesda y by a Senate panel.
Most of that money, $3.7 billion, went to back pay to federal workers who were furloughed during the shutdowns — and did not perform any work during that time. An additional $300 million-plus went for other costs that include extra administrative work and lost revenue.
The investigation covered the most recent three shutdowns: 16 days in October 2013, three days in January 2018 and 35 days from December 2018 to January 2019.
The estimate does not include the cost to the national economy. The Congressional Budget Office estimated last winter's shutdown, the longest in American history, took $11 billion out of the gross domestic product and reduced real GDP growth from 3.5 percent to 3.1 percent.
And investigators were not able to capture the entire cost of the shutdowns because the departments of Defense, Agriculture, Justice and Commerce said they were not able to provide shutdown cost estimates to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
The lost revenue came because the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission were not pursuing as many wrongdoers as normal. (Basic law enforcement operations continued, but some non-urgent prosecutions and civil matters were delayed.)
The report cites a breakdown in the congressional budgeting process that has been intensifying for a decade or more — the result of the partisan gridlock born mainly by divided government — and the subsequent game of political chicken between the White House and Capitol Hill. (While President Barack Obama was in a standoff with a Republican House in 2013, President Trump was at loggerheads with a Congress under GOP control last year.)
The Senate panel's report recommends legislation to prevent a shutdown by automatically extending all appropriations at current levels when budget deadlines pass without a deal, which is called a continuing resolution.
To avoid another shutdown such a so-called CR will have to get through Congress and be signed by Trump before this fiscal year ends Sept. 30, because almost none of the spending bills for the coming year are done. The president and congressional Democrats have not yet settled on the terms for giving themselves an extension to get their budget work done.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.