Welcome to the shutdown, 2025 edition. On Tuesday evening, the US Senate was unable to pass a spending bill that would have kept the US government funded, and for the first time in nearly seven years, federal operations have been drastically curtailed.
At some point, this shutdown – like all the ones before it - will end. It may take days; it may take weeks, but eventually, as public pressure and political pain grows, one side or the other will yield.
Here are four scenarios for how that might play out.
Senate Democrats shot down a Republican spending bill that would have kept the government operating until November, but that vote may have contained the seeds of their defeat.
While forty four Democrats (and Republican iconoclast Rand Paul) voted no, two Democrats and one Democrat-allied independent sided with the Republican majority.
