Acting at the eleventh hour, Congress avoided a U.S. government shutdown by passing a continuing resolution that funds the government through mid-March 2025. Lawmakers will try again to complete the 12 bills that set spending levels for the 2025 fiscal year that began on 1 October when the new, 119th Congress convenes on 3 January.
It’s déjà vu all over again.
The U.S. research community is holding its breath after the abrupt collapse last night of a bipartisan deal to avoid a government shutdown on 21 December. If Congress fails to reach an agreement in the next few days, federal research agencies would have to suspend most operations, staff would be sent home, websites frozen, meetings postponed, training disrupted, and research projects halted. Depending on how long a pause lasts, instruments could be closed and missions delayed or canceled, as has occurred in past shutdowns.
The current impasse is a result of Congress missing its annual deadline to pass the dozen bills that set federal spending levels for the 2025 fiscal year, which began on 1 October. In recent years, it has become routine for Congress to approve so-called continuing resolutions (CRs) that allow funding to continue to flow at current levels until the new appropriations are finalized. The most recent CR expires at midnight on Friday.Earlier this week, Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson (R–LA) unveiled a 1547-page bill that would fund the government through 14 March 2025—enough time to give incoming President Donald Trump and the new Republican-controlled Congress a chance to put their stamp on 2025 spending levels. But given Johnson’s razor-thin Republican majority in the House, and Democratic control of the Senate, the CR included a number of provisions designed to attract Democratic support, as well as provisions not directly related to spending that have bipartisan support. The result was a bill that not only set spending levels, but also included extra payments to distressed farmers, disaster aid, new rules on pharmacy billing, and a pay raise for lawmakers.
That approach outraged many conservatives. The fury grew after billionaire Elon Musk took to his social media platform X to urge his 200 million followers to lobby lawmakers to oppose the bill. Trump and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance also released a statement demanding lawmakers return to the negotiating table. The end result: a stalemate that has lawmakers scrambling to find a solution as the clock ticks down.
Barring a last-minute agreement, as of 12:01 a.m. Saturday federal government operations will be suspended except for those critical to protecting lives or property (although it is likely few agencies will feel any disruption if Congress can approve a deal by Sunday). If the shutdown is still in place come Monday, hundreds of thousands of federal workers will be sent home; those who remain on the job will in many cases be required to work without immediate pay.
It’s a familiar scenario for many federal scientists, who experienced a 16-day partial shutdown in 2013 and a 35-day partial shutdown in late 2018 and early 2019—the longest in history.
If a shutdown does occur, here are some likely impacts, based on past experience:
Researchers who receive federal grants from agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) won’t be immediately affected.
It’s likely that NIH and NSF will still accept grant applications. But if staff are furloughed, grant review meetings will be canceled or postponed, phone calls and emails won’t be answered, and new awards won’t be made.
At research infrastructure that NSF supports, a small number of employees will likely be deemed essential and will continue to provide support for research programs in the Antarctic and other exceptional work environments. And many NSF-funded telescopes should be able to remain open, because they are managed for NSF by outside organizations.
At NIH, a small subset of its some 20,000 employees will likely remain on duty to care for patients at the NIH Clinical Center and maintain research animals and cell lines for labs in the agency’s intramural research program. No new patients will be enrolled in trials unless their illness is life threatening. In the past, the agency has also kept open PubMed, which holds biomedical research abstracts needed for health care, and the ClinicalTrials.gov registry, where reporting of clinical studies is a legal requirement.
At the Department of Energy (DOE), which runs 17 national laboratories and large facilities such as x-ray synchrotrons and neutron sources, managers often have enough reserve funding to continue operations for a short while. Once that reserve runs out, DOE would be obligated to idle facilities, and the labs, most of which are run by contractors, would have to furlough most of their 70,000 employees, as has happened in the past. For example, during the 2013 shutdown, DOE wound up shuttering the National Ignition Facility, a giant laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that has recently made dramatic advances in fusion research.
Most of NASA’s staff would be furloughed, but operations of the International Space Station, space telescopes, and missions already in space would continue.
At the same time, shutdowns are costly for most researchers because they must shut down and then restart projects. And the longer a shutdown lasts, the more disruptive it becomes.