Sen. James Lankford wants to make government shutdowns a relic of the past, and he says Congress came within three votes of doing it before. Now the Oklahoma Republican is teaming up with Sen. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat, to reintroduce the Prevent Government Shutdowns Act and fast-track it to a Senate floor vote.
The pitch is simple: if Congress can't fund the government on time, Congress doesn't get to leave town. No recess. No taxpayer-funded travel. No overseas junkets. And the government stays open on automatic 14-day funding extensions until lawmakers finish the job.
After two shutdowns during this Congress, one lasting 43 days, the other 76, and tens of thousands of Department of Homeland Security workers going months without pay, the question isn't whether the idea has merit. It's why it took this long to get serious about it.
The Prevent Government Shutdowns Act would automatically trigger short-term continuing resolutions, keeping the government funded in 14-day increments whenever a lapse in appropriations occurs. That alone would prevent the spectacle of padlocked national parks, furloughed workers, and suspended services that Americans have endured repeatedly.
But the bill's real teeth are aimed at the lawmakers themselves. During any funding gap, members of Congress and their staff would be barred from taxpayer-funded travel outside Washington, D.C. Congressional delegations overseas, the kind that often look more like vacations than fact-finding missions, would be canceled. And recesses would be off the table entirely.
The logic is straightforward: shift the pain from the public to the people who created the problem.
As Lankford told Fox News Digital:
"The Prevent Government Shutdowns Act ends government shutdowns forever with a simple idea: if Congress doesn't do its job, Congress doesn't get to go home. We shift the pressure off the American people and onto the people they elected. We came within three votes of passing this before, and it is time to finish the job."
Hassan framed it in similar terms, pointing to the real-world cost of congressional dysfunction.
"Government shutdowns are costly, avoidable, and make people in New Hampshire and across the country pay the price for the failures of Congress."
She added that the legislation "incentivizes Congress to fund the government on time and ensures that there is a plan in place to protect families and our economy if Congress cannot come to an agreement."
This isn't Lankford's first run at the bill. He pushed the same legislation in 2023, and it came remarkably close. Nearly every Senate Republican supported it. Nearly every Senate Democrat voted against it. The lone Republican exception was Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
That voting pattern deserves scrutiny. Democrats routinely claim to care about federal workers, about government services, about the disruption shutdowns cause. Yet when a bipartisan bill arrived that would have eliminated shutdowns entirely, the overwhelming majority of Senate Democrats voted no.
Why? An unnamed Democratic congressional aide offered Fox News Digital a revealing answer. The aide argued that "however well-intentioned this bill may be, what it would really do is make it much less likely Congress does its job and passes funding bills." The concern, the aide said, is that automatic continuing resolutions would become a permanent default, and Congress would "forfeit one of its few tools to hold the president accountable through the power of the purse."
The aide then offered a pointed hypothetical, suggesting the president might "send $1.8 billion in taxpayer funds to January 6 rioters" without congressional leverage to stop him.
Set aside the loaded framing. The argument boils down to this: Democrats would rather keep shutdowns as a political weapon than protect federal workers and the public from the fallout. They want the crisis. They need the crisis. Without it, they lose a pressure point.
Lankford's timing is deliberate. The bill arrives with momentum from a recent Senate rules change led by Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, who successfully altered chamber rules to prevent senators themselves from collecting paychecks during shutdowns. That measure passed, and the appetite for accountability remains strong.
The latest shutdown hit especially hard. The Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for border security, immigration enforcement, and disaster response, saw tens of thousands of its workers go without pay for months. That's not an abstraction. Those are customs officers, Border Patrol agents, Coast Guard members, and TSA screeners who showed up for work and didn't get paid because Congress couldn't agree on a spending bill.
Meanwhile, Republicans are in the middle of the budget reconciliation process to finish funding immigration operations at DHS. The Senate is expected to advance that package by week's end. The shutdown bill adds another layer to the broader push to get the government's fiscal house in order.
Government shutdowns have become a recurring embarrassment, a bipartisan failure that punishes the people least responsible for it. Federal workers miss rent payments. Small businesses near government facilities lose customers. Veterans face delayed benefits. And the lawmakers who caused it all fly home for recess.
Lankford's bill doesn't solve every spending problem in Washington. It doesn't force Congress to pass a real budget. It doesn't end the addiction to continuing resolutions that keep the government running on autopilot at last year's spending levels.
But it does something no other proposal has managed: it makes Congress absorb the consequences of its own failure. No travel. No recess. No escape. Stay in Washington and finish the work.
The Democratic objection, that the bill would remove a "tool" for holding the president accountable, reveals more than its authors probably intended. The "tool" they're describing is a government shutdown. They're arguing, in plain terms, that the ability to shut down the government and withhold pay from federal workers is a feature of the system, not a bug.
That tells you everything about who actually treats government workers as pawns.
Lankford plans to fast-track the bill to a floor vote. Whether he can pick up the votes that eluded him in 2023 remains an open question. The political landscape has shifted since then. Two more shutdowns have come and gone. Kennedy's pay-freeze rule change passed. And the public's patience with congressional dysfunction is thinner than ever.
The bill's bipartisan co-sponsorship gives it a chance. Hassan's involvement signals that at least some Democrats recognize the political cost of being seen as the party that prefers shutdowns to solutions. Whether enough of her colleagues agree, or whether the caucus again closes ranks to preserve its leverage, will say a great deal about which party is serious about governing.
If Congress can't even pass a bill that says "do your job or stay at your desk," it's hard to imagine what accountability mechanism it would accept. And that, more than any single shutdown, is the real problem.
