Why Reporters Think the 2025 Government Shutdown is Different

Past standoffs eventually gave way to compromise. In 2025, trust is gone, the old rules don’t apply and there may be no clear path out.

“Either I’ll be back home very late tonight, or, I don’t know…next week?”

That was what my partner, a Capitol Hill journalist, said as the Senate prepared to vote on two bills to keep the government open. Both failed, and for the eleventh time since 1980, the U.S. government shut down.

For the press corps who cover Congress, shutdowns are familiar—but this one is different from the two most recent ones under Trump. In January 2018, Democrats caved after three days over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The second, far more painful, dragged on for 35 days over Trump’s border wall funding.

Even during that five-week slog, reporters knew the outlines: who would “cave,” who would win the PR war. As one Hill reporter recalled: “The last shutdown was about the nuts and bolts of annual spending—border wall funding was relatively simple to negotiate. Health care is far more complex and has divided the parties for decades.”

The 2019 shutdown also generated spectacle. Speaker Nancy Pelosi uninvited Trump from the State of the Union. He retaliated by canceling her military jet for a congressional trip. But what finally broke the standoff wasn’t political theater—it was air traffic. A shortage of 10 FAA workers briefly grounded flights at LaGuardia and snarled travel across the East Coast, forcing Trump into a deal.

This time, reporters say, the dynamics are more troubling. “Unlike past shutdowns, the administration has threatened to fire federal workers or not pay them retroactively. That’s one key difference,” one Hill reporter said. Yet the threat hasn’t moved Democrats or Republicans toward a resolution. Underneath it all lies a deeper problem: there is no trust left. The handshake deals that once ended shutdowns are gone.

“The lack of meetings and movement is in stark contrast to the last ones,” another journalist told me. “Each side knows the other’s position, and there isn’t an offramp to bridge that gap.” In the past, small bipartisan groups quietly hammered out compromises. This time, that informal “gang” hasn’t materialized. “Most reporters are complaining every day is Groundhog Day,” said one veteran. “There’s very little actual progress. Republicans won’t negotiate until the government is open. This could go for a while.”

I’ve covered three of the most recent shutdowns and countless near-misses. During those, press scrums in hallways produced constant updates, even if reporters resorted to tired football metaphors about yard lines and end zones. Ironically, the less lawmakers talked, the closer they often were to a solution.

Not this time. Eight days into the Great Shutdown of 2025, leadership can’t stop talking. Senate Majority Leader John Thune keeps scheduling doomed votes, then rescheduling them. House Speaker Mike Johnson faces a separate PR challenge: bringing the House back would seat a new member who could provide the decisive signature on a discharge petition to release the full Epstein file. Johnson waved off concerns, telling reporters: “We’ve done our job.”

Reporters note how entrenched leaders are. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen leadership this dug in and frustrated with one another,” one said. But some hold out hope that moderate senators, especially on Appropriations, could eventually bridge divides if given the authority.

No one knows how this ends. Some journalists expect the shutdown to drag on past Nov. 1, when Affordable Care Act open enrollment begins, but predict Thanksgiving airline travel could force action. Others point to off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia as pressure points. “One side has to blink,” one reporter said. “But what gets them to do so remains the question.”

For Hill veterans, though, the stalemate is part of a larger problem. “A lot of the press corps keeps treating this like a normal shutdown where Democrats and Republicans can eventually compromise,” one reporter told me. “But who cares what John Thune or Hakeem Jeffries says when Russ Vought can take a chain saw to anything? We’ve never seen a president flout the appropriations process like this. We keep pretending things will go back to normal. But with Trump, the old rules don’t apply. At that point, who cares how this gets resolved?”

The crisis isn’t just that the government is closed—it’s that the political machinery once relied on to end these standoffs no longer functions. Reporters who have covered Washington for decades see that clearly. The bigger question may not be when the shutdown ends, but whether the system that used to resolve them still exists at all.