The 1995 and 1996 Government Shutdowns in Dated Steps and the Lessons Learned

Ask a Democrat who won the shutdown fights of the 1990s and you will get an answer in half a second. Ask a Republican and you will get a longer one, with a sigh in it. That difference tells you something before we have looked at a single date.

Here is the odd thing. The same Republican majority that closed parts of the government twice in the winter of 1995 and 1996 also, within two years, signed a balanced budget deal with the same president. It lost ground in public opinion, kept both chambers of Congress in the next election, and went on to produce the first budget surpluses in a generation. Everybody can find a piece of that story to wave around. Almost nobody tells all of it.

I'll do it by the calendar, the way a good prosecutor builds a case or a good coach breaks down film. At each step you get the date, what happened, and a line on why it mattered. Then we will weigh the two sides' claims and pull out the lessons. If you want the mechanics of a shutdown before we start, read what a government shutdown really shuts down and who gets paid, and for how the spending bills are supposed to move, How a budget becomes law, from the President's request to the checks.

First, how a lapse in funding becomes a shutdown

Congress has to pass spending bills, known as appropriations, each year. The fiscal year starts October 1. If the bills are not enacted by then, the government has no legal authority to spend money, and a law called the Antideficiency Act forbids agencies from spending without it. For decades, lapses were handled informally, and agencies kept going. That changed after two legal opinions written by Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti in 1980 and 1981, which read the law strictly: when the money runs out, agencies must stop all but essential functions. That strict reading is why a missed deadline means furloughed workers, closed parks and delayed paperwork.

Hold on to the point, since it shapes everything below. A shutdown is not a policy. It is the consequence of a failed negotiation, and both sides decide whether to risk it.

The standoff: January to October 1995

January 4, 1995. The 104th Congress convenes with Republicans in charge of the House and the Senate at the same time for the first time since the 1950s. Newt Gingrich is Speaker. The new majority's first task is to deliver on the promises in the Contract with America, a story told in The 1994 Contract With America and the End of Forty Years of House Rule.

Why it mattered: The majority had run on a balanced budget. It was now responsible for producing one, with a Democratic president holding the veto.

Summer 1995. Congress adopts a budget plan to balance the budget in seven years, relying on the numbers of the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan scorekeeper. President Bill Clinton offers a plan on a longer timeline, ten years, using the administration's own numbers.

Why it mattered: The fight was not only about whether to balance the budget but about how to count. Seven years versus ten, and whose forecasts to trust, became the core disagreement. Republicans wanted the CBO to be the referee because they believed the administration's estimates were too rosy.

Fall 1995. The Republican budget, assembled in a large reconciliation bill, slows the growth of Medicare and Medicaid, changes welfare, and includes a large tax cut. Democrats call the Medicare piece a cut, and Republicans say it slows the growth of a program that would otherwise grow faster than it can be paid for. Both descriptions are about the same numbers.

Why it mattered: Medicare is the program where the public trusts the Democratic message more easily. Republicans entered the fight on terrain where the opposing side could simplify the argument to a few words.

September 30, 1995. Congress and the president agree on a short-term spending measure, known as a continuing resolution, to keep the government open through November 13.

Why it mattered: It bought six weeks. Nothing was settled.

Shutdown one: November 14 to 19, 1995

November 13, 1995. Clinton vetoes a new stopgap spending bill that contained a rise in Medicare Part B premiums, and he vetoes a bill raising the debt limit. The talks collapse.

November 14, 1995. The first shutdown begins. Roughly 800,000 federal workers are told to stay home. National parks and many museums close. Services considered essential, such as the military, air traffic control and law enforcement, continue.

Why it mattered: For the first time in years, a large share of the government shut down for several working days over a budget dispute, and it happened on the watch of a party that had campaigned against Washington's dysfunction.

November 15 to 16, 1995. Gingrich complains to reporters about a snub on a trip: on the flight to and from the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin earlier that month, he said, he had been made to leave Air Force One by the back door, and he suggested that the slight had played a part in how the budget talks had gone. A New York tabloid runs a front page calling him a crybaby.

Why it mattered: Whether or not the complaint was fair, it handed opponents an easy story: the Speaker was shutting down the government over a seat on an airplane. Gingrich later said it was not the reason. The perception stuck anyway, and perception is what voters run on. It is a lesson about explaining your motives before someone else does it for you.

November 19, 1995. The two sides reach a deal to reopen the government and fund it through December 15. Clinton agrees to work toward a balanced budget in seven years, using CBO estimates, and Republicans drop the Medicare premium increase from the stopgap.

Why it mattered: Republicans got the principle they wanted, which was a seven-year balanced budget with CBO as the scorekeeper. It was a real win. But the details were left to later talks, and later talks were where it fell apart.

Shutdown two: December 16, 1995 to January 6, 1996

December 6, 1995. Clinton vetoes the Republican balanced-budget bill, the large reconciliation package.

Why it mattered: It removed any chance that the Republican plan would become law as written. The only path forward was a compromise or a standoff.

December 15 and 16, 1995. The stopgap expires. Talks have not produced a budget deal. A second shutdown begins on December 16. This one is partial, because Congress had by now enacted several of the annual spending bills, so some departments were already funded for the year. More than 200,000 workers were affected.

Why it mattered: The partial nature meant it was less visible to the public than the first. But it dragged on. The arithmetic: December 16 through December 31 is 16 days, and January 1 through January 5 is 5 more, which makes 21 days before workers were back on January 6. That was the longest shutdown in history to that point.

Meanwhile, the Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, was taking extraordinary accounting steps with federal retirement funds to avoid hitting the debt limit and defaulting. It was a quiet crisis behind the loud one.

January 5 to 6, 1996. Congress passes a short-term bill to send workers back, and the government reopens, with the larger budget fight still unresolved.

Why it mattered: Republican leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, who was campaigning for the presidency, concluded that the standoff was costing more than it was gaining. Our profile of him, Bob Dole came home wounded from Italy and became a master of the Senate, shows why he preferred deals to showdowns.

January 23, 1996. In his State of the Union address, Clinton says that the era of big government is over.

Why it mattered: It was a statement that the political center of gravity had moved in the Republican direction, even as the president claimed the shutdowns as his victory. Both things are true at once.

Spring and summer 1996: the deal that finally came

March 1996. Congress passes and Clinton signs an increase in the debt limit, ending the Treasury's maneuvering.

April 26, 1996. Clinton signs an omnibus spending bill to fund the rest of the fiscal year, which began the previous October. The government has spent about seven months on a patchwork of stopgaps.

Why it mattered: It finished the budget that had started the fight. By most accounts it also confirmed that the real policy outcomes of the shutdowns were modest. Republicans got some spending restraint, and Clinton got most of his priorities protected.

August 22, 1996. Clinton signs the welfare reform law after vetoing two earlier versions. It was one of the Contract with America's central promises.

Why it mattered: It showed that a divided government could still produce lasting policy when both sides gave ground. We explain how in divided government gave us welfare reform and a balanced budget.

November 5, 1996. Clinton is re-elected with 379 electoral votes to Dole's 159 (together 538), receiving 49.2 percent of the vote to Dole's 40.7. Republicans keep majorities in both the House and the Senate.

Why it mattered: The party lost the White House race but kept Congress, and the House Republican majority was the first to be re-elected since 1928.

August 5, 1997. Clinton signs the Balanced Budget Act and a tax cut law that included the child credit.

Why it mattered: It was a deal that the Republican Congress and the Democratic president wrote together. The federal government ran a surplus in fiscal year 1998, the first in almost three decades, and then ran surpluses for three more years.

Who won?

Here are the two claims in their strongest form.

The Democratic claim. The shutdowns were a political disaster for Republicans. Polls at the time found that more people blamed the congressional leadership than the president. Clinton's standing recovered, Gingrich's standing dropped, and the party looked extreme. Clinton won re-election comfortably.

The Republican claim. The shutdowns forced the president to accept a seven-year balanced budget scored by CBO, which he had resisted. They changed the terms of the debate, and Clinton's own declaration that the era of big government was over proved it. The fight led to welfare reform, spending restraint and, in 1997, a balanced budget agreement and surpluses. A majority that lost a news cycle kept its seats in 1996.

I think both are right about what they say and wrong about what they leave out. The Democrats are right that the shutdowns hurt Republicans in public opinion, and a conservative who denies it is not looking at the record. The Republicans are right that the goal, a balanced budget, was eventually reached (we make the moral case for it in A Balanced Budget Is a Moral Argument Before It Is an Accounting One), and that the confrontation was part of how the party showed it was serious. But they did not have to be so costly. The same results arrived through negotiation, not closure.

The lessons

Here is what I take from the dated record.

1. Know the end state before you start. The 1995 Republican leadership had a clear goal, the seven-year balanced budget. It had a less clear idea of what it would accept as a win on any given day. When the fight started, Clinton had the veto and the microphone. A plan for getting out is part of the plan for getting in.
2. The side that is blamed loses leverage. In a shutdown, the public decides who to blame within days. A party that has already campaigned against government is easier to blame for closing it. Know which way the public will look.
3. Don't give your opponent a story. The Air Force One episode cost nothing in policy terms and a lot in perception.
4. Pick one fight at a time. Medicare, the debt limit, taxes and the budget were all in play at once. Trying to win all of them gave Clinton the chance to defend the most popular one.
5. Governing still matters. What the 1997 deal shows is that the party's most lasting achievements came from negotiating. A majority that can say yes at the right moment earns the right to say no.

The debt limit, the other lever in this fight, came back in 2011, with better results for the party, as the 2011 debt-limit fight that produced real spending caps explains. The shutdown pattern repeated, too. There was a 16-day shutdown in October 2013, and a 35-day one from December 2018 to January 2019 (ten days in December and twenty-five in January). Each time the same questions came up, and the same lessons were relearned.

The bottom line

• The first shutdown lasted five days, November 14 to 19, 1995, and the second ran 21 days, from December 16 to January 6. Both grew out of a dispute over how to balance the budget in seven years using CBO numbers.
• Republicans won the principle of the seven-year balanced budget, welfare reform and later the 1997 deal. They also took a political hit and gave Clinton a story he used skillfully.
• A shutdown is a risky tool. Use it only with a clear goal, a plan for the exit, and an honest read on who the public will blame.
• If you serve in government at any level, write down your end state before you pick your fight. If you vote, ask your representative what win he is aiming for.
• Check the specifics yourself. Congress.gov has the bills, the votes and the dates for every step in this story.