So, how long have we known when the government would have to shuyt down for lack of approc-ved funding?
Months & months.
Yet the Republicans blew it off until two days before the deadline.
If you were a CEO and the CFO stopped your office on a Wednesday & said " Oh, by the way, we have to shut down on Friday because I didn't take the time to put together a spending plan for the year. If I feel like it, we might be OK if I can throw something together to cover us for two weeks.
Wouldn't you fire his ass?
None of this would be an issue of you progressives simply learned to compromise and vote for a balanced budget each and every year.
Whether a budget is balanced or not has nothing to do with when appropriations expire. Congress passes an appropriation that authorizes government entities to spend money up to a point in time. When the appropriation expiry date arrives, the government can no longer spend money unless and until Congress authorizes additional spending.
A government shutdown is when non-essential
discretionary federal programs close. The Executive branch must do this when Congress fails to appropriate funds. In the
normal budget process, Congress appropriates funds by September 30 for the following
fiscal year. When that doesn't happen, then
Congress enacts a continuing funding resolution. If Congress can't even agree on that, then that forces a shutdown.
Source
Whereas discretionary spending must be appropriated every year, mandatory spending is authorized either for multi-year periods or permanently. Thus, mandatory spending generally continues during a shutdown. However, some services associated with mandatory programs may be diminished if there is a discretionary component to their funding. For instance, in both the 1996 shutdowns and the 2013 shutdown, Social Security checks continued to go out. However, staff who handled new enrollments and other services, such as changing addresses or handling requests for a new Social Security card, were initially furloughed in 1996. In 2013, a more limited amount of activities were discontinued, including verifying benefits and providing new and replacement cards, but processing of benefit applications or address changes continued.
Source
Despite the language used, federal government shutdowns do not result from not having money. They result from not having authority to spend money. Never in modern history has literally having no money been the nature of what causes the government to shut down.
Quite simply, the federal government is not like you and me. For us, "funding" means we either have money or we don't. Because the federal government always has access, and in effect unlimited access, to cash, however, "funding" means authority to spend the money to which it has access. That authority comes from Congress in the form of one or more appropriations. It's a situation similar to one's receiving a periodic payment from one's (irrevocable) trust fund and having the trust fail to issue one's next payment. The money is there, but one has no ability to obtain it, thus spend it, until the trust issues the payment.
It's also worth noting that, unlike you and me, the federal government does not "save for a rainy day." What government entities are authorized to spend, they spend. They do this because implicit in their not spending it is the premise that they didn't need it; thus Congress will appropriate less next time round.