A government shutdown occurs if federal agencies run out of money to finance their operations. Under the Antideficiency Act, the government cannot spend money it doesn’t have, so agencies must generally halt their operations until Congress appropriates new money.
Congress is supposed to annually renew agencies’ discretionary spending levels via 12 appropriations bills, but they often run out of time and pass a funding stopgap instead.
House lawmakers have already passed a Continuing Resolution to keep government funding levels on cruise control until November. But Democratic senators prevented the CR from passing the upper chamber and have no plans to relent unless partisan funding concessions are made – concessions Republicans are refusing to grant.
Political betting markets currently peg the chance of a partial government shutdown at above 80%. If that happens, the impacts on everyday Americans will vary widely based on occupation, region, and socioeconomic status.
During a shutdown, federal agencies and operations deemed essential – including national security, law enforcement, Border Patrol, outbreak monitoring, and emergency response – would remain fully open. Despite possible delays, Amtrak rail and airports would still run, the State department would continue processing passports and visas, and the Department of Education would continue administering student aid.
Americans would also continue to receive their mail, Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ benefits. These services can remain open because the U.S. Postal Service is almost entirely funded by its own revenue and the entitlement programs are funded by mandatory spending, which automatically renews without congressional approval.
But a shutdown would cripple the Food and Drug Administration’s routine food facility safety inspections and the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspections of water systems, chemical facilities, and hazardous waste sites, as well as halt hazardous waste cleanup.
All national parks and museums would close, clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health would see interruptions, and applications for federal housing or small business loans would stall. The supplemental nutrition program WIC would quickly run out of money, and food stamp benefits could be delayed if a shutdown drags on.
Although the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provided funds for the Internal Revenue Service to stay open in the event of a shutdown, there is no guarantee this will happen. Under previous shutdowns, the IRS furloughed 90% of its employees, paralyzing operations.
Federal employees in “essential” positions – such as service members and air traffic controllers – would work without pay until the shutdown ends. “Nonessential” government employees – such as Park Rangers and presidents of local EPA offices – would remain furloughed and unpaid until the shutdown ends. At that point, both groups would receive backpay.
The only federal workers who would receive pay throughout a shutdown are those in agencies not funded by Congress, such as USPS workers.
Neither political party would benefit from a government shutdown, which hasn’t occurred in seven years. The most recent lasted from Dec. 22, 2018, to Jan. 25, 2019, the longest shutdown in U.S. history. Republicans were the minority party in the Senate and forced the shutdown, consequently receiving much of the blame. Given that Democrats now occupy that role, a shutdown now would likely harm their party the most.
The stakes are even higher this time around given that the Trump administration is planning to make some of the furloughs permanent if the government shuts down. An Office of Management and Budget memo called on agencies to “use this opportunity” to eliminate agency positions deemed unnecessary.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
