Checks and Balances in a Divided Government: Do They Still Work?

For forty-three days last fall, national parks closed, air-traffic controllers worked without pay, and nearly 900,000 federal employees didn't know when their next paycheck would arrive. The 2025 shutdown became the longest in American history, and it happened for a reason that sounds almost too simple: Congress and the White House could not agree on a spending bill before the fiscal year began. I kept waiting for someone in the system to just fix it — a court order, a presidential override, something — and nothing came, because nothing was supposed to. That was the moment I realized checks and balances are not a safety net that catches gridlock. They are the gridlock, working as intended, and I wanted to understand why a system that can freeze itself for six weeks still counts as functioning.

Figure 1. The U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., home to the branch of government that controls federal spending.  Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

The Shutdown as Designed Friction

The Constitution gives Congress, not the President, the power to appropriate federal money. When the two chambers and the White House cannot agree on how to spend it, funding simply lapses, because nothing in Article I forces a resolution on any particular timeline. The 2025 shutdown began on October 1 when a stopgap bill failed in the Senate over a fight about expiring health-insurance subsidies, and it did not end until November 12, when a bipartisan coalition finally passed a funding package covering most agencies only through January 30, 2026. Nobody's veto broke the deadlock. Public pressure and expiring paychecks did. That is a slow, expensive way to force compromise, but it is also exactly the mechanism Article I creates.

Figure 2. A closure sign at Muir Woods National Monument during the 2025 federal shutdown—one of the most visible everyday effects of the funding lapse.  Image source: Associated Press via ABC News.

A Quieter Fight Over the Same Power

A less visible dispute has been running alongside the shutdown story: whether the executive branch can simply decline to spend money Congress already appropriated. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 — passed after President Nixon impounded funds he opposed — requires the President to spend or formally ask Congress to rescind appropriated money, not just withhold it unilaterally. In 2025, an Office of Management and Budget order froze federal grants pending a policy review, and lawsuits followed under that Act. Courts have not spoken with one voice: a federal appeals court ruled in August that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue at all, and the Supreme Court allowed roughly four billion dollars in foreign aid to lapse unspent in September while stressing that its order was not a ruling on the merits. Congress's power of the purse and the executive's claimed discretion over how urgently to spend are still being argued out, case by case.

Figure 3. The White House, Washington, D.C. — the executive branch at the center of the 2025 impoundment disputes.  Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

Slow Is Not the Same as Broken

It is tempting to call all of this dysfunction, but the framers built a system that assumes disagreement between branches and lets that disagreement play out publicly rather than resolving it behind closed doors. What should worry a future lawyer more than a shutdown is a workaround: a branch that avoids losing an argument by declining to have it. An impoundment fight fought and lost in court is the system working, however slowly. An appropriation quietly never spent, with no one able to establish standing to challenge it, is closer to the system being routed around.

Conclusion

I used to think "checks and balances" meant the branches keep each other honest automatically. What the shutdown and the impoundment cases taught me is that the balance only holds if someone is willing to litigate it every single time, in public, at real cost. That is a less comforting picture of the Constitution than the one in a civics textbook, but it is the one I actually want to study — not the theory of separated powers, but the ongoing, expensive, unglamorous work of forcing the branches to keep arguing instead of walking away.

Sources

1. USAFacts (2025). The 2025 government shutdown is the longest in US history. https://usafacts.org/articles/government-shutdown-2025-what-to-know/

2. Wikipedia. 2025 United States federal government shutdown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_government_shutdown

3. Missouri Independent (2025). Trump in court ruling allowed to hold back foreign aid funds approved by Congress. https://missouriindependent.com/?p=26666

4. Impoundment Control Act of 1974 background summary, MWC LLC. https://mwcllc.com/2025/01/28/impounding-congressionally-appropriated-funds/