New Year, New Shutdown?
From the Founder’s Desk
Welcome, Wonks, to 2026.
As we open the new year, Washington is carrying some unfinished business.
After last fall’s funding drama, the government is once again facing a January deadline.
This time, no one appears eager to force a shutdown—but that doesn’t mean zero risk.
Our Deep Dive this week breaks down what’s actually at stake, who holds leverage, and why “no shutdown” doesn’t necessarily mean no uncertainty.
If you missed it amid your holiday time away, be sure to check out our year-end analysis Three Quiet Constraints Shaping Child Welfare in 2025.
Looking across over 50 Weekly Wonks and nearly 20 premium briefs from 2025, we identified three persistent trends in child and family policy that will matter in 2026.
Building on that, next week we launch Wonk Intelligence Quarterly, a recurring premium brief highlighting key trends and how decision makers can navigate them.
Each week, our free Weekly Wonk newsletter and WonkCast conversations illuminate the terrain in which we find ourselves.
Our Wonk Briefing Room and organizational partnerships go further, unpacking how to navigate that terrain, integrating our intel into your strategy and decision making.
We’re excited to continue building what we offer you in 2026. Wishing you a clear-eyed—and well-briefed—start to the new year.
Let’s get into it.
Weekly Wonk Deep Dive
Will There Be Another Government Shutdown?
By Doug Steiger, Senior Contributor
After all the drama from the longest shutdown in history, which consumed Washington this fall, most of the federal government is still only funded through the end of January.
Is another shutdown on the horizon? Maybe, but this time feels different.
Unlike in the fall, key policymakers aren’t openly preparing for a high stakes showdown fight. No one is advertising a lapse in funding as a political strategy.
That lowers the temperature, but it doesn’t remove the risk.
At this point, a shutdown wouldn’t come from performative standoffs.
It would come from failure: an inability to negotiate a deal that can pass Congress and survive the Administration. That’s a narrower and more fragile path than it sounds.
The Situation
There has been progress in the appropriations process – but it’s partial and uneven.
Three of the dozen annual funding bills have become law. They fund agriculture, veterans programs, and the legislative branch.
One important consequence: the enactment of the agriculture bill prevents further disruptions to SNAP benefits this fiscal year.
From here, it gets harder.
A bipartisan and bicameral framework for three more funding bills just emerged today, to cover:
Interior-Environment;
Commerce, Justice, Science; and
Energy & Water.
The Senate has also been negotiating a package of five funding bills.
That package includes the Labor-HHS bill, which covers core child and family policy programs, such as CAPTA, Head Start, and other social service programs.
If this five-bill Senate package were enacted before January 31st, up to 90 percent of the federal government would remain open, even if the remaining bills fail (they would technically trigger a small partial shutdown).
That distinction matters.
The shutdown risk at the end of January isn’t all-or-nothing. It hinges on whether this middle tranche of bills, which funds most of the government, clears in time.
Why This Is Still Fragile
When Congress returns this week, the new three-bill package is slated to get consideration in the House.
Even if enacted, this would still leave unfinished six funding bills, including Labor-HHS.
Negotiations continue on those, and the Senate could still vote on its five-bill package that incudes Labor-HHS.
If they succeed, then the House will need to take up the package and pass it, clearing the way for the President to sign the bills into law.
On paper, it’s a straightforward sequence. In practice, it’s anything but.
The House may not accept the Senate bills.
House Republicans have been developing their own versions, with lower domestic spending levels than the bipartisan Senate bills.
It remains unclear whether those House bills have the votes to pass—but their existence alone complicates acceptance of the Senate deal.
Pressure also comes from the other side.
Some House Democrats may oppose the Senate package on the grounds that it underfunds key programs or fails to meaningfully constrain the Administration.
If it becomes clear that the Senate package cannot move through the House, attention will shift to a continuing resolution (CR).
A CR would fund the affected programs in the five bills at roughly last year’s level for the rest of the fiscal year and avoid a shutdown for these programs.
In the fall, Democrats opposed a continuing resolution without some agreement around the Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies.
So far they have not made a similar challenging demand of Republicans and those subsidies are now the subject of a separate, likely futile, legislative negotiation process.
There is a path to avoiding a shutdown at the end of January, but there are a host of hurdles on the way.
The Players To Watch
This is not a clean partisan standoff. The pressure points run through incentives, not party labels.
The Appropriators (both parties): the legislators in both parties drafting the funding bills, who have a strong interest in their work becoming law.
A CR wipes out earmarks, delays new investments, and strips appropriators of leverage.
Their strongest preference is passing the funding bills, not extending last year’s funding on autopilot.
House Democrats: interested in what they see as solid funding of their priorities in the funding bills and in pushing back on what they see as excesses by the Administration.
Support for bipartisan Senate deals is not automatic, particularly where implementation authority is left ambiguous.
Defense-Focused Conservatives: pushing for funding increases for the military, which a CR would not achieve.
Spending-Focused Conservatives: pushing to reduce domestic spending and concerned a CR may fail to do this.
Trump Administration: opposed to limits on their authority, such as efforts by the appropriators to insist that money they provide be spent by government agencies, not unilaterally cut by the Administration.
That posture injects late-stage uncertainty even when congressional negotiations appear close to resolution.
To avoid a shutdown, negotiators must appease all these interests to at least some degree.
For example, lead Republican appropriators in the House and Senate agreed in late December that the total spending amount in the funding bills would be lower than it would be if a CR were enacted for the whole government.
This will help win support with conservative members, but Democrats will want to see the details.
What’s Likely
Negotiators will spend January trying to enact a bipartisan package before the end-of-month deadline.
That remains the preferred path for most players.
It keeps the government largely open, avoids the blunt instrument of a full-year CR, and preserves leverage for appropriators and defense hawks alike.
But the margin for error is thin.
If the House cannot accept the Senate package—and there’s still no clear path that satisfies both spending-focused conservatives and skeptical Democrats—a CR will become the fallback option.
That fallback would avert an immediate shutdown.
What makes this moment different is not open confrontation, but brittleness.
Deals that work only if nothing else changes tend to fail late. And with multiple actors able to disrupt the process, the risk compounds quickly.
A shutdown is not the most likely outcome.
But it remains very much on the table.
What Decision Makers Need to Know
This isn’t the fall – as of now, there do not appear to be key Washington players preparing for a shutdown as a political strategy.
But there’s a lot of complicated negotiating needed to avoid one.
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That’s it for this week.
Stay sharp, Wonks.
Z
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