January 25th Congress passed a bill to get the government up and running again after over a month of it being shut down. President Donald Trump reluctantly signed, but inevitably the bill states that it is only temporary. Time magazine says it will shut down again February 15th.

On December 22, 2018, Mike Pence met with the senate in order to help them understand the purpose of The Wall and if the US could afford it. They were not hopeful of coming to a conclusion in the meeting.

President Donald Trump partially shutdown the government in order to secure funding for the border wall.

According to The Washington Post, the point of a government shutdown is to halt government spending until it can be redistributed. This last month the government has been shut down in order to figure out if money is going to be spent on building a wall or not. In the past, President Trump has made it known that he wants Mexico to pay for the wall, but that has not happened yet.

There have been many attempts to get the US government back up and running, but all attempts have been shot down by the Senate, mainly because they don’t agree with what Trump has to offer.

Democrats are still in the process of writing a new proposition, but in general do not want to have such a permanent barrier. Many democrats have expressed that they would rather have  new fencing installed and believe it is unnecessary to spend over 5 billion dollars on a wall.

The real downside to a government shutdown is that the employees of the federal government will not be paid until the government is running again. There are two ways this could go. People will either be expected to go to work and not get paid, or they will be put on an unpaid furlough.

With most federal employees not getting paid people are getting aggravated due to the fact that they have to work anyway. Politico explains that the unemployment levels of federal workers has skyrocketed in the first two weeks of January. More than 25,000 employees have applied for unemployment as of January 12th.