Connecticut officials say they feel prepared to weather the early days of a federal government shutdown, which would begin early Wednesday, unless there’s an 11th-hour funding deal.
Essential services would continue even as other government operations grind to a halt, and certain federal employees keep working, albeit unpaid, until it’s over.
But the prospects of a prolonged and indefinite shutdown could mean trouble for certain government programs, especially those supporting many working and low-income families who have come to rely on nutrition aid and child care services.
The uncertainty around this particular shutdown has made it harder to predict exactly how things could play out, especially as President Donald Trump said Tuesday that his administration could wield its executive power in ways he called “irreversible.”
Gov. Ned Lamont said he sees the funding impasse in Congress as only the most recent example of Washington becoming an unreliable partner to the states. That’s on top of the administration’s other changes and reversals that have directly affected Connecticut, including the attempt to halt work on Revolution Wind.
“We’re really worried about the shutdown — not in the near term. We can mitigate things in the near term. We’ve got reserves. Nothing’s going to happen tonight or tomorrow,” Lamont told reporters in Hartford on Tuesday hours before the funding deadline and end of the federal fiscal year. “But if this goes on for a couple of months, there could be some people that are really hit.”
States like Connecticut have inevitably felt the strain when Congress failed to meet its funding deadline in past years. But the stakes are even higher with a shutdown that could begin early Wednesday with no immediate indications of how long it could last or how it’ll get resolved.
Consequences for Connecticut
In remarks opening the second annual “Insuring the Future” conference on Tuesday in downtown Hartford, Lamont said Connecticut needs the support of the federal government. He said he supports the push by congressional Democrats regarding their health care demands but doesn’t see a shutdown as tenable either.
“Make a deal. This is bully-boy brinksmanship,” Lamont said, “Look, I’m with the Democrats. You don’t want everybody’s health insurance to spike up and all of a sudden you can’t afford to provide health care for your kid. And you also can’t have a shutdown. There’s got to be a compromise you guys can make.”
In a shutdown, essential functions and services continue, including the intelligence community and other national security agencies. The most immediate consequences are furloughs of federal employees who work for various government agencies.
Some workers, however, are exempt, such as the active duty military, some federal civilian employees and most air traffic controllers. But they won’t get paid during a shutdown and will receive back pay only after government operations resume.
Connecticut has about 7,300 people in its federal civilian workforce, according to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service. It used data from September 2024, months before the Trump administration started slashing federal jobs.
“There’s no question we need to be mindful of the pain that will be caused,” U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said. “Federal workers are going without paychecks. It’s an outcome that we’d like to avoid.”
The longer a shutdown lasts, the more it could interrupt other key services. Connecticut’s senators warned of risks to veterans’ affairs facilities, as well as Head Start child care centers, that might not be deemed essential, as they had not been in the past. During the 2013 shutdown, Connecticut was one of half a dozen states that saw closures of Head Start centers, including one in Bridgeport.
But given an already-diminished federal workforce, a shutdown this time around brings new risks, including the slowdown of important grants to some programs and services..
Nutrition assistance is also one of those areas that could see disruptions more quickly. That includes federal programs like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children — better known as WIC — and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP benefits.
WIC appears to be particularly under threat in a shutdown. An administration official told the publication RealClearPolitics that the program’s funding will dry up in October, which will likely affect new enrollment and benefits for current recipients.
But DeLauro said there’s a $150 million in a WIC contingency fund that would keep things running but would be unlikely to last throughout a protracted shutdown. She also noted there are ways to “repurpose” funds and redirect to some of these programs running low, though SNAP appears to have a longer runway.
“My hope is that … the contingency fund can help us through. In other areas, there are programs that can go through SNAP and others that can go through November. We will hopefully see that Republicans will come to the table and deal with a negotiation to move forward,” DeLauro said on a Tuesday press call. “States are going to have to take a look at what a Plan B might be. But there’s $150 million in a WIC contingency fund.”
There are nearly 7 million pregnant and postpartum individuals, infants and young kids who rely on WIC, which also includes about 40% of infants born in the country, according to the Food Research & Action Center.
Lamont said funding would continue for major entitlement programs like Medicaid. But he echoed that federal money for WIC, the supplemental nutrition program for about 50,000 people in Connecticut, would disappear quickly.
“I think we have reserves in place that can keep us going for the near term, but just the very near term,” Lamont said.
Ongoing debates
The likelihood of a shutdown — the first in more than six years — comes at a time when there’s an ongoing debate over expiring health care subsidies, further reductions in the federal workforce and economic strains like tariffs.
The “deferred resignation program,” which was offered to federal employees months ago to voluntarily resign from their roles, will go into effect starting Oct. 1, just as a shutdown begins. Government agencies will now feel the full weight of a hollowed-out workforce, leading to some uncertainty over future operations.
On top of that, Trump and the Office of Management and Budget instructed agencies to move forward with reduction-in-force plans for nonessential employees. This could lead to permanent firings instead of just furloughs during a shutdown, but critics push back that this effort wouldn’t hold up in court.
The funding standoff also comes when Congress has ceded much of its constitutional authority of the “power of the purse” to the executive branch.
Connecticut’s lawmakers and the rest of the Democratic Party are holding firm to their health care demands. But so are Republicans, who are pushing Democrats to accept the short-term bill in front of them. That passed the House with GOP support but stalled in the Senate without the votes from Democrats needed to pass the 60-vote threshold.
The parties couldn’t agree to a stopgap measure, known as a continuing resolution, that would keep government agencies running at current levels for a specific amount of time. A short-term deal buys them more time to negotiate a full-year spending package for fiscal year 2026.
Republicans and Democrats had different versions. The GOP pushed for legislation to keep things running through Nov. 21. Democrats countered with a version that would fund the government until Oct. 31 but would also include some health care provisions and prevent Trump from rescinding funding Congress already approved. Both included additional funding for lawmaker security.
It would be the first shutdown since one that started in late December 2018 and lasted into January 2019, during Trump’s first term.
As the government inched closer to a shutdown on Tuesday, Democrats tried a last-minute procedural maneuver that Republicans shut down.
A group of House Democrats, including U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, wanted to force a vote on their funding bill during the pro forma session. But the limited opportunity quickly flamed out, with Tuesday’s session wrapping up in a matter of minutes.
DeLauro, who is the top Democrat of the House Appropriations Committee, which helps craft spending bills, sought to be recognized so she could offer a motion for unanimous consent, but the GOP lawmaker presiding over the floor quickly adjourned the House until the next pro forma session on Friday. Democrats yelled in objection as the chair banged the gavel.
The House was initially supposed to be in Washington the first two days of the week, but GOP leaders cancelled votes for Monday and Tuesday and will not be back in full session until next week — days after the funding deadline passed.
Politics of a shutdown
A last-minute meeting at the White House on Monday ended when neither side would back off their approach. It was the first time leaders in both parties plus the president were all in a room to negotiate before the Wednesday deadline.
Democratic leaders said big differences remain. Vice President JD Vance declared that the country is heading toward a shutdown and blamed Democrats.
But the fruitless meeting drove home a larger point: how will Congress get out of a shutdown if neither side will budge?
Meanwhile, the finger-pointing has intensified in recent days over who would get the blame.
“Until they’re serious about a negotiation, it’s pretty clear what their desire is. We’re in this position today because Republicans boycotted negotiations,” U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said Monday shortly after congressional leaders went to the White House to talk about the funding impasse. “But they’ve got to start getting serious about what’s about to happen to our health care system, what’s happening to our democracy.”
Frustrated by Democrats’ demands, Trump threatened cuts to programs that the Democrats support.
“We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible by them, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like,” Trump told reporters Tuesday from the Oval Office. “And you know all you all know [OMB Director] Russell Vought. He’s become very popular recently, because he can trim the budget to a level that you couldn’t do any other way. So they’re taking a risk by having a shutdown.”
Back in Connecticut, most Republican state representatives wrote a letter to Senate leaders in both parties, urging them to approve the House-passed version of a short-term bill. They argued a shutdown would cause needless hardship for Connecticut residents and families.
“Allowing a shutdown would needlessly disrupt our local, state and national economies, threaten public safety, and undermine public confidence in our institutions,” they wrote in the letter sent to the Senate last week. “Connecticut families and communities would feel the pain with immediate effect and confusion. Put simply, a government shutdown should not be used as political leverage to pass partisan reforms — our constituents are not chips Congress should be bargaining with.”
Other looming crises
While a shutdown is at the forefront of conversations in Washington, Congress will still need to eventually deal with expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies and whether it’s part of any funding negotiations. Those enhanced premium subsidies will expire at the end of the year, and if they’re not extended in some way, premiums will spike in 2026.
Republicans have resisted including the expiring subsidies in a funding bill and believe they can be addressed later in separate legislation. Democrats argue there’s an urgency to get it done now, particularly with open enrollment in the state-based exchanges beginning on Nov. 1.
If the subsidies expire at the end of the year, states would have to pick up the costs. For Connecticut, officials could spend more than $295 million a year, according to a spokesperson with Access Health CT.
Nationally, if the subsidies expire at the end of the year, the Congressional Budget Office projects that more than 4 million people would lose health care coverage over the next decade, citing increases in out-of-pocket expenses because of more costly premiums. Connecticut residents who get insurance through the state health care exchange could pay an average of $1,700 more a year.
The expiration of enhanced tax credits will lead to out-of-pocket premiums for ACA marketplace enrollees increasing by an average of more than 75%. Insurers expect healthier enrollees would drop their coverage and cause premiums to then go up, according to a Peterson-KFF analysis.
“The people I talked to this morning in Connecticut before I came down here are asking me, ‘How do I know whether I can afford this insurance?’ Blumenthal said in an interview Monday after he came down to D.C. for votes. “There are real lives and real people who are going to be really hurt if we don’t extend this insurance now.”
CT Mirror reporter Mark Pazniokas contributed to this story.
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
