Governing by Deadline.

The findings, before the argument.

Between 1 October 2025 and today the United States federal government has suffered three separate lapses in appropriations. One ran 43 days and closed the whole government, the longest on record. One ran 76 days at the Department of Homeland Security, with Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement unfunded for 116 days, the longest lapse ever at a single department. Funding expires again on 11 December 2026, and not one of the twelve fiscal 2027 appropriations bills has been enacted or has passed the Senate.

• The direct economic cost is real and small. The Congressional Budget Office put the permanently unrecovered output loss from the 43-day shutdown at US$7bn to US$14bn, about US$11bn on the scenario that occurred. Fourth-quarter 2025 growth fell to 0.5 per cent annualised from 4.4 per cent, and the following quarter recovered to 2.1 per cent.
• Markets did not price it, and were right not to. The S&P 500 rose about 2.8 per cent across the 43 days. The ten-year Treasury yield fell eight basis points. There was no identifiable distortion anywhere in the Treasury bill curve.
• Scope determines damage, not duration. The 76-day Homeland Security lapse was longer than any shutdown in American history and left no measurable footprint in the national accounts, because roughly 85 per cent of the department kept working on reconciliation money. Any thesis that reads length as severity is wrong on the 2026 evidence.
• The bond market distinguishes a shutdown from a debt-limit date, precisely. Bills maturing around the 2023 debt-limit date carried roughly 100 basis points of distortion. The 2025 shutdown produced none. A shutdown never touches debt service. An exhaustion of borrowing authority does.
• The damage that does not reverse is to the measurement system. The October 2025 household survey was never fielded and the October 2025 consumer price index was never collected, breaking series that had run continuously since 1948 and 1921. Neither can be reconstructed.
• The binding constraint is net interest, not the shutdown cycle. It reached a record US$1.05 trillion in fiscal 2026 and consumed about 19 per cent of federal revenue, against debt held by the public at 101 per cent of GDP, the first time since the Second World War. Correcting that requires legislation, and thirteen months of lapses are the clearest available evidence on the probability of legislation.

Shutdowns are not the disease. They are the test result.

Three lapses in thirteen months.

Appropriations lapsed across all twelve bills on 1 October 2025 over the expiry of the enhanced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits. It ran 43 calendar days and ended with Public Law 119-37, after the Senate passed it 60-40 and the House concurred 222-209. No official count of furloughed employees exists; the defensible range is 1.3 to 1.6 million federal employees affected.

The side that forced the shutdown lost. The deal bought a guaranteed Senate vote on the subsidies and no House vote. The Senate votes failed on 11 December 2025 and the credits expired. Average monthly net premiums rose 58 per cent from US$113 to US$178, average deductibles rose 37 per cent to a record US$3,786, and sign-ups fell by more than a million to 23.1 million, the sharpest single-year fall since the exchanges opened. Forty-three days of closure and about US$11bn of permanently lost output bought nothing.

Ten weeks later the same instrument was used again. Customs and Border Protection agents killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis in January 2026, Senate Democrats withdrew support for the Homeland Security bill, and appropriations lapsed on 31 January. Homeland Security funding then lapsed alone from 14 February for 76 days.

The mechanics of that third lapse matter more than its length. About 85 per cent of the Homeland Security workforce, some 200,000 people, kept working, because Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were funded from the 2025 reconciliation law and about US$10bn of multi-year reconciliation money paid some 70,000 law enforcement personnel. The department was shut and its principal enforcement arms were not. The bite fell on the Transportation Security Administration, whose officers worked unpaid, missed a full pay packet on 13 March, and of whom more than 1,110 out of roughly 50,000 resigned by 27 April.

The scopes are not comparable and should not be summed into a single headline. Days of government-wide lapse: 43. Calendar days on which at least one agency was unfunded: about 161.

All twelve fiscal 2026 bills were finally enacted on 30 April 2026, seven months into the fiscal year. For fiscal 2027, a continuing resolution passed the Senate 90-6 on 8 August and the House 370-48 on 1 September, and was signed on 2 September, funding agencies to 11 December and removing the 1 October cliff ahead of the midterms. Three of the twelve bills have passed the House. None has passed the Senate. None has cleared Senate Appropriations.

Why it recurs, which is a question about machinery rather than personalities.

The law converts a disagreement into a closure, and guarantees it saves nothing

The Antideficiency Act bars federal agencies from obligating funds without an appropriation, with removal and, for a wilful violation, criminal penalties. It was written in the nineteenth century to stop agencies overspending and then presenting Congress with a bill it had to pay.

Before 1980 agencies generally kept working through a lapse and Congress ratified the obligations afterwards. A Comptroller General decision in March 1980 and the two Civiletti opinions of April 1980 and January 1981 ended that, holding that agencies must suspend operations and furlough staff. Civiletti expressly noted that the earlier opinion had not addressed a general congressional failure to appropriate on time. The regime that now governs the recurring case was never designed for it.

The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 then guaranteed retroactive pay. The combination is routinely missed and it is decisive. A shutdown defers payroll, pays it in full later, and destroys the output that would have been produced in between. There is no fiscal argument for a shutdown. The only argument is leverage.

Regular order stopped producing appropriations a generation ago

Congress has enacted all twelve regular appropriations bills on time four times in roughly fifty years, most recently for fiscal 1997. It passed continuing resolutions in 44 of the 47 fiscal years from 1977 to 2023, more than two hundred in total. The twelve-bill process is no longer the normal mechanism of federal funding. The stopgap is, and every stopgap creates a new deadline and a new hostage.

The supermajority applies to exactly the spending that can lapse

Appropriations bills and continuing resolutions require sixty votes for cloture. Reconciliation requires fifty-one. Discretionary spending, the only category that lapses, is therefore the one category the majority cannot move alone, while mandatory spending and tax policy can be legislated around the minority entirely. The routine thing is hard and the contested thing is easy.

The 2026 Homeland Security episode is the clean demonstration, and it is the development worth watching most closely. The minority's leverage over discretionary appropriations was not overcome. It was routed around: Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were funded through reconciliation in June 2026, on 52-47 in the Senate and 214-212 in the House. Funding operating agencies that way makes them immune to shutdown leverage, which lowers the value of taking the hostage. It also moves spending out of the process that exists to control it, on bare partisan majorities, for multiple years, with weaker direction and oversight. If that becomes the pattern, shutdowns get less effective and the congressional power of the purse gets weaker at the same time.

There is no overlap left between the parties

On the first dimension of the standard congressional voting scale, the distance between party means in the 119th Congress is 0.910 in the House and 0.923 in the Senate, the highest readings in a series running from 1879. Under ten per cent of members in either chamber are moderates. Party overlap is exactly zero and has been since 2001 in the House and 2003 in the Senate: no Republican is less conservative than the most liberal Democrat, or the reverse. Senate polarisation now exceeds the House's, which matters because the Senate is the chamber where forty-one votes is a veto.

The tactic survives its own failure, and the reform that would stop it is stalled

A tactic repeated after it has demonstrably failed is not being used to obtain an outcome. It is being used to establish a position. The Prevent Government Shutdowns Act would impose rolling automatic continuing resolutions and confine members to Washington with no votes on anything but appropriations. It has twenty-four bipartisan cosponsors and has sat on the Senate calendar since 1 June 2026 without floor action. The Senate did find time to vote 99-0 for cloture on a resolution withholding senators' own pay during shutdowns, which binds only the Senate, takes effect only after the November midterms, and does not have the force of law. The asymmetry between those two is the clearest single measure of institutional seriousness here.

No comparable economy has this problem, for identifiable reasons

Germany's Basic Law authorises the federal government to keep making necessary payments if the budget is not adopted. Canada has Governor General's Special Warrants. The United Kingdom has votes on account and a confidence convention under which losing a supply vote can bring down the government. Japan passes a provisional budget. Australia, the closest structural analogue with an elected upper house able to block supply, resolved its one real episode in 1975 by dismissing the Prime Minister.

The United States combines separated powers, a supermajority threshold in one chamber, and a statute that criminalises obligation without appropriation, with no default spending authority of any kind. No comparator has all three. In every other system the penalty for deadlock falls on the government. In the United States it falls on federal employees and the public.

A quarter of growth, substantially recovered.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the shutdown would reduce fourth-quarter 2025 annualised growth by 1.0 to 2.0 percentage points depending on length, and that US$7bn to US$14bn of output would never be recovered. The realised drag was about 1.0 percentage point from reduced federal labour services, with federal spending subtracting 1.15 points, the largest such drag since the first quarter of 1994, as federal spending fell at a 16.6 per cent annualised rate.

The 2025 shutdown was 1.23 times the length of the 35-day shutdown of 2018 and 2019 but cost roughly 3.7 times as much permanent output, US$11bn against US$3bn. The difference is scope. The 2026 Homeland Security lapse completes the proof in the opposite direction: far longer than any precedent, and no measurable national-accounts effect, because reconciliation money substituted for appropriations across most of the department.

The documented transmission is into capital formation, not consumption

Three channels are properly evidenced, and they are the ones that matter to a transacting business.

• Securities registration stopped. About 90 per cent of the Securities and Exchange Commission's staff were furloughed, more than 900 registration statements were filed into a closed agency, and more than a dozen companies revised listing timelines. Registration statements cannot be declared effective while the Commission is shut.
• Cross-border review stopped. CFIUS filing reviews were tolled for the entire 76 days of the Homeland Security lapse and resumed only on funding. This is the one clean, verifiable 2026 transmission channel, and it is institutional rather than a price.
• Credit stopped. The Small Business Administration reported US$5.3bn of lending to about 10,000 small businesses blocked during the 43 days. Federal contractors, unlike federal employees, have no statutory right to back pay.

Beyond those, no credible quantified evidence of broader private investment deferral attributable to the shutdowns could be found, and none is asserted here. The closest authoritative precedent, the Federal Reserve's Beige Book of March 2019 on the 2018 and 2019 shutdown, found consumption effects across about half the districts and did not report investment deferral.

One attribution error to avoid

Federal employment has fallen from a January 2025 peak of 3.010 million to 2.674 million in August 2026. This is overwhelmingly a policy-driven workforce reduction through deferred resignations, incentivised exits and hiring freezes. The Government Accountability Office, which recorded a net reduction of about 256,000 positions across twenty-two agencies in the thirteen months to January 2026, does not attribute any of it to the shutdowns. The workforce effects properly attributable to the shutdown cycle are the 3,605 reduction in force notices issued during the 2025 lapse and later rescinded in full, and the Transportation Security Administration attrition in 2026. Conflating the two is the most obvious error available in this subject.

The damage that does not reverse.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics cancelled nine releases outright. For most of them the release was cancelled and the data published later. Two were different.

The October 2025 household survey was never fielded. The Bureau has confirmed the data were not collected for that reference period and will not be collected retroactively. There is no October 2025 unemployment rate, no participation rate and no household-survey measure of any kind, and there never will be. That series has run since 1948. The Bureau also collected no consumer price data between 1 October and 12 November 2025 and declined retroactive collection, since price surveys are not recall-based. No October 2025 all-items or core index was ever published. The consumer price index has been published every month since 1921.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis cancelled the third-quarter 2025 advance GDP estimate outright and had to build the national accounts across the gap by imputing October price indexes. The Consumer Expenditure Survey lost both October and November 2025, leaving fourth-quarter consumer units at about one third of the usual number, and the adjustments made for that feed through into the February 2027 consumer price index weight update.

The quality cost has been measured by the agency itself

Carry-forward imputation for the October 2025 housing component understated the twelve-month change in rent by 0.25 to 0.55 percentage points and in owners' equivalent rent by 0.28 to 0.61 points, against four research alternatives. The distortion converged by April 2026 when the panel was next collected, so that particular wound healed. The blackout is nonetheless still degrading published output: twelve-month percentage changes for October 2026 will not be published for indexes where the October 2025 comparison is unavailable.

The revision record shows what degraded source data does to a number people trade on. Fourth-quarter 2025 growth was published at 1.4 per cent on 20 February 2026, cut to 0.7 per cent in March and finalised at 0.5 per cent on 9 April. Anyone positioned on the first print was positioned on a figure that turned out to be wrong by nearly a full percentage point.

The structural weakness is worse than the blackout, and it is not being fixed

The acute episode has largely washed out. The structural position has not. All thirteen principal statistical agencies have lost staff since January 2025; six have lost at least a third and two more than two thirds. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is down 20.5 per cent, the Census Bureau 19.3 per cent and the Bureau of Economic Analysis 20.9 per cent, and the fiscal 2027 budget request proposes further cuts to the first two. Only six of the thirteen agencies have permanent heads. The Census Bureau has had no Director since early 2025 and no nominee.

The Bureau's own report to the appropriations committees is the most damaging document in the file. The 2026 sample of 60,000 eligible households is the same as in 1981, against a population base 61 per cent larger. Fewer than fifty net changed responses can move the headline unemployment rate by a tenth of a point. Twenty years ago a monthly change of 0.18 points was detectable within one month; it now takes two. The proposed remedy costs about US$60m a year.

Monetary policy ran on the degraded series, and the subject has since disappeared

In October 2025 the Federal Reserve chair described the problem as driving in fog, and said the response was to slow down. The December 2025 minutes recorded participants relying on private-sector and limited government data. What has happened since is more interesting. None of the six 2026 policy statements mentions the shutdown, delayed releases or data gaps. The September 2026 minutes do not mention funding risks or data availability. The October 2026 Beige Book contains no reference to either.

No criticism of the Committee's judgement is intended, and none is implied. The absence is noted because the absence is the finding. A measurement system with permanent holes in it, a fifth of its staff gone and survey response below seventy per cent has been absorbed as normal within a year. On 16 September 2026 the Committee raised the target range to 3.75 to 4.00 per cent on a 12-0 vote, its first increase since 2023, with headline consumer price inflation at 3.7 per cent.

Private substitutes do not close the gap. For September 2025, one commercial payroll series reported 32,000 jobs lost while another estimated 60,000 gained. A divergence in both sign and magnitude cannot be resolved without an official anchor, and many private series are benchmarked to the official data they are supposed to replace.

Not the shutdown cycle.

The S&P 500 opened the 43-day shutdown at 6,664.92 on 1 October 2025 and closed at 6,850.92 on 12 November, a gain of about 2.8 per cent, with the Nasdaq Composite up around 4 per cent. On the first morning the index was down 0.1 per cent and within reach of an all-time high. The logic is sound rather than complacent. Output is recovered, employees are paid in arrears by statute, the spending affected is a small share of the economy, and debt service is not an appropriated activity and therefore never at risk.

The bill curve distinguishes a shutdown from a debt-limit date, precisely

This is the distinction the whole subject turns on, and it is usually blurred. A shutdown is a lapse in appropriations: agencies cannot spend, but the Treasury's borrowing authority and debt service are untouched. An exhaustion date is the end of borrowing authority: debt service itself is in question.

Markets price the difference exactly. Bills maturing around the August 2023 debt-limit date yielded roughly 100 basis points away from bills maturing in other months, and credit default swap implied risk-adjusted default probabilities peaked near 6 per cent in 2011 and 4 per cent in 2013 and 2023. Across the 43-day shutdown of 2025 the one-month bill moved from 4.20 to 4.17 to 4.20 per cent and the three-month from 4.02 to 4.01 to 4.03, with no kink and no identifiable premium anywhere in the curve.

The long end has repriced hard, for reasons that are not about governance

The ten-year Treasury yield rose above 5.35 per cent on 7 October 2026, its highest since 2002, with the thirty-year at 5.70 per cent. The drivers are identifiable and governance is not among them: inflation, with energy prices lifted by the Iran conflict; a central bank raising rates with more priced beyond; heavy long-dated corporate supply, with artificial intelligence related issuance estimated at US$489bn year to date; and real yields, with the ten-year inflation-protected yield rising from 1.90 to 2.94 per cent across the year. Above all this is a global move. Japanese ten-year yields are at three-decade highs, gilts at their highest since 2008 and French ten-year yields approaching 5 per cent. Models attribute most of the 2026 rise in the US ten-year to expected short rates rather than to the term premium.

Term premium estimates themselves disagree by about 45 basis points across the three standard models. No single one of them should be quoted as a fact, and anyone who does is choosing a model to suit a conclusion.

There is a structural change underneath that does bear on fiscal credibility, and it is about who has to be paid to hold the paper. The foreign share of Treasuries outstanding has fallen from 49 per cent in September 2013 to about 33 per cent in September 2025, and private investors now hold roughly 73 per cent of the market against about half a decade ago, with official bill flows swinging from a net purchase of US$134bn in the twelve months to June 2025 to a net sale of US$41.9bn in the twelve months to June 2026. Private holders are more price-sensitive than official ones. That is the channel through which fiscal credibility is actually transmitted.

The rating agencies price polarisation, and one of them now names shutdowns

All three major agencies rate the United States one notch below triple-A with a stable outlook. S&P, affirming on 27 June 2026, cited the distance between the parties, the elusiveness of bipartisan cooperation on deficits, and the political system's limited ability to reverse the deterioration in the fiscal position. It did not mention shutdowns. It did say it expects Congress to keep resolving the debt ceiling, which is a stated assumption and therefore a stated exposure.

Fitch, affirming the United States at AA+ with a stable outlook on 13 August 2026, warned that gridlock and government shutdowns may become both more likely and more protracted.

That is the clearest statement by any agency that the shutdown cycle is a forward-looking credit consideration.

Two things this paper does not claim

First, nothing in the 2026 market record can be attributed to the shutdowns. A United States and Israeli air campaign against Iran began on 28 February 2026, two weeks before the Homeland Security lapse. The Strait of Hormuz closed on 4 March, Brent rose 55 per cent by 27 March, and the S&P 500 bottomed on 30 March. Month-end market reviews for February 2026 attribute the month to technology valuations, sector rotation and the Middle East, and do not mention the shutdowns at all. The 2026 lapses are not a usable natural experiment and are not treated as one here.

Second, gold is not corroborating a de-dollarisation story at present. It peaked near US$5,589 an ounce on 28 January 2026 and traded around US$4,032 on 23 October 2026, roughly 29 per cent below the record and down year on year. The dollar's share of allocated global reserves fell half a point in the second quarter, to 56.7 per cent. The genuine signal in that data is central banks relocating custody, not changing allocation.

Fiscal 2026 closed with outlays of US$7.396 trillion against receipts of US$5.403 trillion, a deficit of US$1.992 trillion or about 6.1 per cent of GDP, worse than the US$1.9 trillion projected in February. Net interest reached a record of about US$1.05 trillion, roughly 19 per cent of federal revenue. Debt held by the public is 101 per cent of GDP, the first time since the Second World War, and is projected at 120 per cent by 2036 with net interest reaching US$2 trillion. That is the exposure, and no shutdown created it.

11 December, and the confrontation behind it.

The live disagreements are the defence against non-defence topline and a possible defence reconciliation bill of nearly US$100bn; Homeland Security and border funding again; disaster relief, nutrition programmes, housing and public health; policy riders; whether to maintain the restriction on the Office of Management and Budget finalising its grants rule; and the administration's authority to transfer, withhold, rescind or condition appropriated funds. Enhanced Affordable Care Act premium assistance, the issue that caused the 43-day shutdown, remains unresolved.

The impoundment question is the one to watch. In September 2026 the administration proposed rescissions of about US$810m from eleven accounts expiring at the end of the fiscal year, on the theory that funds proposed for rescission within forty-five days of year end can simply be run out. The Government Accountability Office concluded on 29 September 2026 that this does not permit withholding past the end of the fiscal year. Three suits are pending and one judge has paused grant cancellations. There is no Supreme Court ruling on pocket rescissions.

A dispute about whether the executive must spend what Congress appropriates is a dispute about whether an appropriations agreement is worth anything. That makes agreement on the bills themselves harder, because the minority has less reason to trust a negotiated number. The fight has migrated from whether money is appropriated to whether appropriated money is spent.

The arithmetic and the calendar are both unfavourable

Midterm elections fall on 3 November 2026, thirty-eight days before the deadline, and Congress returns to roughly five legislative weeks. Zero of twelve bills are enacted and the Senate has passed none. Surface transportation authorities, the National Flood Insurance Program and the pause on the grants rule all expire on the same date, with a further set of health programmes expiring on 31 December.

The Congress that must clear the cliff is the current one regardless of the result, since the new Congress convenes on 3 January 2027. If a chamber changes hands, the outgoing majority legislates knowing its successor is hostile and the incoming majority has every reason to push decisions into 2027.

What is priced, and why it should not be leaned on

Prediction markets were quoting 32 to 33 per cent on a lapse still being in force at 10am Eastern on 12 December 2026, as at 24 October, on twenty-four hour volume of US$159. Two calibration points are worth more than the price. The equivalent contract on the 1 October 2026 deadline peaked at 35 per cent in late July and collapsed to about one cent when the stopgap was signed. And during the Homeland Security lapse, prediction markets centred on a 22-day shutdown against a realised 76 days. These markets have not been good at pricing the duration of political brinkmanship.

The debt limit is the confrontation that would genuinely matter

The limit was raised, not suspended, by US$5 trillion to US$41.1 trillion in the reconciliation law signed on 4 July 2025. Federal debt passed US$40 trillion in August 2026. The limit is expected to be reached in the first half of 2027, with exhaustion from late 2027 into the first quarter of 2028. There is no official exhaustion date and it should be presented as a range.

The procedural detail is what makes this serious. If either chamber changes hands in November, reconciliation ceases to be available as a simple-majority route to raise the limit, leaving bipartisan agreement or abolition of the filibuster. A shutdown closes offices. A debt limit breach touches debt service, and the bill market has already shown it will price that at around 100 basis points when it becomes live. They should not be assessed with the same calm.

What follows from the evidence.

The shutdown cycle is chronic, structurally entrenched and getting longer, held in place by a statute that forces closure, a procedural rule that makes routine funding harder than partisan legislation, a legislature with no ideological overlap at all, and an incentive structure in which the cost falls on people with no vote in it. Its direct economic cost is small and mostly recoverable. Its direct market cost is close to zero and markets are right about that. Its durable cost is the degradation of the official statistics and of federal administrative capacity, neither of which carries a price, and both of which raise the probability of a policy error that does.

Practical implications

• Do not trade the shutdown. Positioning into funding deadlines has been a reliable way to pay spreads for no return.
• Price the governance constraint into long-dated United States dollar duration. Not because shutdowns damage Treasuries, but because the same gridlock caps the probability of the fiscal correction the long end is implicitly asking for, and because the buyer base has shifted decisively toward price-sensitive private holders.
• For transaction timing the transmission is administrative, not financial. Securities registration, CFIUS review, agency approvals, small business lending and the economic data calendar all stop in a lapse. Anyone planning a pricing window, a regulatory filing, a notifiable transaction or a federally dependent approval in the first half of December 2026 should build in the possibility of a two to four week administrative freeze.
• For anyone whose models consume United States official statistics, assume further holes and widen the error bars rather than the conclusions.

The claim this paper does not make

The temptation is to argue that the shutdown cycle is quietly destroying American creditworthiness. The evidence does not support that and it is not argued here. Equities rose through the longest shutdown in history, the bill curve showed nothing, every agency rates the United States one notch below triple-A with a stable outlook, the Treasury funded a US$1.992 trillion deficit without difficulty, and the long end sold off in a global move driven by inflation, policy and supply.

The narrower claim holds, and it is harder to dismiss. The United States has a fiscal trajectory that requires legislative correction, and thirteen months of evidence that its legislature cannot complete routine tasks, let alone hard ones.

One rating agency has now put that in writing. It is a statement about probability, not about imminent distress, and it should be held that way.

What would prove this wrong.

A paper that cannot be falsified is not analysis. Four developments would change the assessment set out above, in ascending order of significance.

Equally, the case against this paper is straightforward and should be stated. If the December cliff passes with a routine continuing resolution, if the February 2027 weight update lands without incident, and if the debt limit is raised in 2027 without a confrontation, then the shutdown cycle will have been exactly what markets have priced it as: noise.

Where every claim in this paper comes from.

Sources

• Congressional Budget Office, publication 61823, economic effects of the 2025 shutdown under three scenarios, 29 October 2025; and The Effects of the Partial Shutdown Ending in January 2019, 28 January 2019
• Bureau of Economic Analysis, Gross Domestic Product releases for Q4 2025 (20 February, March and 9 April 2026) and Q1 and Q2 2026 (30 April and 30 September 2026)
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, revised release dates following the 2025 and 2026 lapses in appropriations; shutdown impact on the consumer price index and the Consumer Expenditure Survey
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review, counterfactual imputation approaches for the housing component of the October 2025 CPI, May 2026
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Report to the Appropriations Committees on Modernizing the Current Population Survey, April 2026
• Federal Reserve, FOMC statements and minutes, December 2025 to September 2026; H.15 selected interest rates, 23 October 2026; Beige Book, 14 October 2026
• Federal Reserve, Chairman Warsh, keynote remarks, Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, 28 August 2026
• Benzoni and Wernick, The 2025 US Debt Limit Through the Lens of Financial Markets, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Working Paper 2025-07
• Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Phantom Figures: Missing Data in October, December 2025; and Public and Private Labor Market Data, Economic Brief 26-04, February 2026
• Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, survey response rates following the 2025 government shutdown, 9 April 2026
• Congressional Research Service, R49105 on lapses in DHS appropriations (7 August 2026); R48874 on FY2026 DHS appropriations; R48832 on the economic effects of the 2025 shutdown (29 January 2026); R48930 on the Antideficiency Act (1 May 2026); R46595 on continuing resolutions; R48640 on the Byrd rule
• Government Accountability Office, B-338788 on the September 2026 rescission message (29 September 2026); GAO-26-108583 on federal workforce changes (17 June 2026); GAO-26-107529 on Treasury market demand (31 March 2026)
• United States Department of the Treasury, Monthly Treasury Statement for September 2026; daily par yield curve rates; Treasury International Capital data; Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee materials, February 2026
• Voteview, Polarization in Congress, DW-NOMINATE series updated 6 October 2026
• Fitch Ratings affirmation of the United States at AA+ with a stable outlook, 13 August 2026; S&P Global Ratings affirmation at AA+ stable, 27 June 2026; Moody's downgrade to Aa1, 16 May 2025
• American Statistical Association, The Nation’s Data at Risk (December 2025) and the 2026 midyear update on resources and leadership (28 July 2026)
• Goldman Sachs Research, Top of Mind issue 142, data reliability, 11 September 2025
• KFF, 2026 ACA marketplace enrolment, premiums and deductibles, 19 May 2026
• Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Appropriations Watch FY2026 and FY2027
• Holland & Knight, Beyond the Midterms, 9 October 2026; Akin Gump, The Approps Drop, 29 September 2026
• Russell Investments, market impacts of government shutdowns, 1 October 2025; Morgan Stanley, Thoughts on the Market, 28 January 2026; J.P. Morgan Asset Management on the 2026 midterms, 8 October 2026
• S&P Global Market Intelligence, US Treasury market largely unfazed by government shutdown, 6 October 2025
• Bloomberg News on the SEC registration backlog, 21 November 2025; Small Business Administration release 26-06, 13 November 2025; United States Chamber of Commerce letter, 30 October 2025
• UHERO, the 2026 global bond sell-off, 12 October 2026; Kalshi contract quotation, 24 October 2026

Not investment advice.

This paper is general commentary on public policy and public markets. It is not investment, legal, taxation or accounting advice, not a recommendation, and not an offer or solicitation in respect of any security or financial instrument. It takes no position on any election, party or candidate. Figures were current at 24 October 2026 and are sourced to the institutions named in the text; where an agency has since revised a figure, the published vintage at the date of writing stands. Readers should seek advice from an appropriately licensed adviser before acting on anything in this paper.