‘Total Lack of Urgency’: Is Congress Going to Start Acting Like the Government Is Shut Down?

As Washington dragged into its fourth weekend of gridlock during the government shutdown, Sen. Lisa Murkowski was in Chicago.

The Alaska Republican had a previously scheduled speaking engagement at the University of Chicago on Saturday, which was Day 25 of the shutdown. She explained to reporters when she was back on Capitol Hill Monday — Day 27 — that the event was an opportunity to speak with young people. She said she was just “doing what I do as a senator.”

Then she paused.

“Why?” she asked. “Why weren’t we here instead? Why weren’t we? And even if it means we just do vote after vote after vote, at least that gets us in the building where I might have to talk to somebody.”

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This shutdown is nothing like the chaotic, major 2013 and 2019 shutdowns she witnessed during her two-decade career in the Senate, she said. It seemed to her that this time, Congress was acting like week four of the shutdown was just any other week in Washington.

“Does it feel any different to you, this day, than whatever day in September when the government was open?” she asked. “It feels exactly the same.”

By the end of the Senate’s work week, Murkowski said bipartisan talks finally picked up steam. But no senator has publicly proposed a complete legislative fix with the clear political legs to end the shutdown.

Capitol Hill denizens who suffered through previous shutdowns say the ongoing lapse in appropriations has had a different, more tedious spirit than frenzied 2013 or 2019 episodes — so much so that “Groundhog Day” comparisons have started to grate. By Wednesday, senators were turning to French literature to describe their political purgatory.

“It’s like ‘Waiting for Godot,’” Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine told NOTUS.

Lawmakers and staffers told NOTUS they have observed an utter lack of urgency this time around. They believe injecting some haste — and perhaps some personal discomfort of late nights and weekend work — into the shutdown will be the key to resolving it.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that what they’re doing now is working,” Brendan Buck, who served as press secretary to former Speaker John Boehner, told NOTUS earlier this week. “And I think there is reason to believe that the annoyance of having to be in Washington over weekends has had an effect previously on getting people to reach an agreement.”

Until this week, the only glimmer of bipartisan bonhomie was on Day 7, when a group of lawmakers ordered Thai food together. By Day 8, senators admitted that session did not bear any policy fruit.

In the absence of good faith negotiations among top leaders, identical votes on a GOP-led funding extension have devolved into a messaging exercise as Democrats insist on adding an extension of Affordable Care Act tax subsidies.

The Senate has conducted this ritual 13 times as errant jokes about the definition of insanity crept into more conversations on Capitol Hill. (Which party has lost its mind is a matter of perspective.)

The Senate has not worked weekends. The House has not worked at all.

“What’s really striking about this shutdown, more than most shutdowns, is that there just seems to be a complete, total lack of urgency to reopening the government,” former Republican Rep. Charlie Dent, a leading moderate negotiator during the 2013 shutdown, told NOTUS Wednesday.

Dent described a relentless flurry of meetings and media hits during the 16-day stand-off between Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Barack Obama over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. As Boehner tried — and failed — to balance appeasing his right flank and dealing with Democrats, the speaker was in daily meetings around Capitol Hill and at the White House. The result was dramatic, around-the-clock work.

“We had a running joke that we were going to have to reopen the government when we ran out of takeout options,” a House Republican leadership aide during the 2013 shutdown told NOTUS.

“My metric for whether a congressional crisis is real tends to be stacks of empty pizza boxes in the hallway,” the staffer added.

House members “didn’t even go home for weekends,” the staffer said. The frantic pace of negotiations meant that one lawmaker started showing up at meetings with his young son.

“Apparently, he’d sold his wife on the idea that he could run for Congress because he’d only be gone three days a week,” the staffer recalled. “And by the end of the first or second week, she got sick of looking after all the kids and sent one of them up for him to look after.”

Suffice it to say: Kids have not sat in on policy negotiations, and pizza boxes have not littered the halls in 2025.

Theories abound about why this shutdown has taken on such an unmistakably different tone.

For one, unlike during the 2019 shutdown fight over a border wall, the GOP’s top dealmaker, President Donald Trump, hasn’t taken a particular interest in this funding lapse. While the president has backed up Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s stance that Republicans will not negotiate with Democrats on health care until they swallow a funding patch, the news cycle coming out of the White House has primarily revolved around the $20 billion bailout of Argentina, Trump’s trip to Asia and renovations to the East Wing.

Vice President JD Vance visited the Senate on Tuesday — Day 28 — to speak to Republicans. Attendees told reporters that Vance primarily talked about tariffs.

“When Donald Trump tells the Republicans not to engage, they don’t engage, right?” Sen. Elizabeth Warren told NOTUS. “They have no independent will. They only do what Donald Trump tells them to do. Donald Trump’s out of the country right now, so all of the Republicans are just hanging back until they hear from their master.”

But Warren’s sentiment lends credence to another leading theory: Partisan animosity and suspicion have consumed much of the first year of the second Trump administration on Capitol Hill.

Democrats have upped the outrage at their Republican counterparts as Trump repeatedly flouts Congress’ Article II constitutional responsibilities. Meanwhile, Republicans blame Democrats of inciting political violence through their criticism of the GOP.

During the shutdown, both parties have accused the other of playing politics with the livelihoods of military personnel and federal workers as well as Americans who rely on the Affordable Care Act subsidies and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

“You all have just figured out 29 days in that there might be some consequences,” Thune said in a fiery Wednesday Senate floor speech about the “Democrat shutdown.”

Murkowski told reporters Wednesday that while she is optimistic that a bipartisan gang could “diagram” a compromise solution to reopen the government in coming days, a “trust deficit” is impeding progress.

Democratic Sen. Mark Warner chimed into her conversation to say that while he trusted Murkowski as an independent voice, he could not count on other Senate Republicans to be the same.

“I do worry about whether they’re willing to make that deal without the president’s sign off,” Warner said. “And so I really do think, unlike in the past, we’ve probably got to get the president deeply engaged.”

But perhaps the most common explanation for why lawmakers haven’t swiftly resolved the shutdown is a lack of pressure, or perhaps the will, to problem solve.

Where in 2013 and 2019, polling showed that Republicans would absorb the brunt of the political blame, this year’s shutdown polls are a mixed bag. The Trump administration has redirected funds from the Pentagon to pay military personnel, removing at least one pain point for lawmakers.

“People have sort of taken away that there aren’t enormous consequences to riding it out a little longer than you may otherwise want to,” Buck said. “And that decreases anxiety, decreases urgency, and just makes it a lot easier to ride it out.”

Urgency, even manufactured, has been a key ingredient in the Republican trifecta’s legislative success. When the GOP endeavored to pass a sweeping reconciliation bill earlier this year, Republicans imposed strict deadlines to keep themselves on task — and knew they would face Trump’s wrath if they failed to meet them.

Trump’s wrath might not come soon, but wrath from constituents might. Air traffic controllers missed a paycheck this week, causing airport delays. SNAP will run out of funds and open enrollment for ACA plans starts this weekend.

Similar deadlines raised the stakes in 2013 and 2019. It’s unclear if the pressure will be enough to meaningfully change the political calculus in 2025. In the meantime, the prevailing sentiment about this shutdown is clear.

“This one’s the dumbest one ever,” Republican Sen. John Cornyn told NOTUS.