Wayne Winegarden has been speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, and he says the first place you’re going to see an impact is on workers.
“If you work for the federal government, you’re not going to go to work, you’re not going to get paid,” the senior fellow in business and economics at the Pacific Research Institute says.
“If you’re a contractor, again, you’re not going to get your payments.”
The longer the shutdown goes on, the more people will feel it – when the cash for social security payments runs out, families receiving those payments will take a hit.
If it goes on longer again, services like the US national parks could see their funding streams dry up.
Winegarden also notes that it’s difficult to know if President Trump will use this shutdown as an excuse to accelerate his plans to make large cuts to the number of federal workers.
“We’ve seen that in past cuts where they’ve fired people and then realised ‘whoops, we need those people’, and then hire them back.”
Unlike the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian has enough money to keep its museums open for a week.
“Smithsonian will use prior-year funds to remain open to the public at least through Monday, October 6, 2025,” the institution says.
The Smithsonian includes more than a dozen museums and galleries that hosted nearly 17 million visitors in 2024. The most popular are the National Museums of Natural History and American History and the National Air and Space Museum.
We have just heard from Donald Trump at the White House, where he once again said he would carry out mass firings of government employees in the event of a shutdown.
He blames Democrats for the shutdown and says: “We’d be laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected.”
“The last thing we want to do is shut it down, but a lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” Trump says. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”
Ana Faguy
Reporting from Capitol Hill
Wyoming Senator John Brasso, like many Republicans, is putting the looming shutdown on the Democrats.
“We need to keep the government open,” he tells a group of us here on Capitol Hill.
He says the government shouldn’t shut down and says Democrats will have the chance to vote to keep the government open later today.
Democrats want an agreement to renew the government health insurance subsidies for low-income individuals that expire at the end of the year. Brasso is among the Republicans against renewing them.
“Those were set up as temporary and were supposed to end when Covid ended, and Covid has ended,” Brasso says.
