Congress should be a venue for deliberation and compromise over policy, but the shutdown shows that Washington’s budget process is broken

As we enter the second day of the U.S. government’s shutdown, many federal employees have been sent home from work without pay, and government contractors and grantees will also start to lose income. Roy Meyers looks at how the U.S government has reached this point, arguing that the Republican Party has not learned the lessons from the previous shutdowns of the 1990s. He writes that further reforms to the budget process are needed and that Congressional legislators need to reject their current short-termism and needless confrontations in favor of making reasonable compromises between opposing ideologies.