Amid a lot of sound and fury, late on Sept. 30 Congress got itself together to pass a temporary funding bill that funded the government and averted at the last minute a government shutdown—for 47 days. Forty-seven days later, Congress did exactly the same thing and passed two temporary funding bills that funded the government and averted again a last-minute government shutdown, this time extending government funding for some agencies and programs until Jan. 19, 2024, and continuing funding for others until Feb. 2.
Why? So we can do this again in another 63 days and then 14 days after that in some kind of real-life reenactment of Groundhog Day? Isn’t everyone sick of this? Moody’s, the credit-rating agency, sure is. On Nov. 10, it downgraded its outlook for U.S. debt from stable to negative and warned that “continued political polarization within U.S. Congress raises the risk that successive governments will not be able to reach consensus on a fiscal plan to slow the decline in debt affordability.” Fitch, another credit-rating agency, issued a downgrade in August. Standard & Poor’s downgraded it in 2011 after another debt-ceiling standoff.
