How the Ryder Cup Mirrors the Incredible Cost of Federal Government Shutdowns

Lessons from the Ryder Cup:

I am reminded daily that real life, done well, can be instructive for our politics and that real life, done poorly, mirrors our politics.

The biennial Ryder Cup golf tournament between Team USA and Team Europe took place this past weekend. It never disappoints. Congratulations to Europe…a team that is so easy to secretly root for…on an amazing victory. Congratulations to our US team for an inspirational comeback attempt.

Golf holds a special place in my heart. It’s a game in which a player calls a penalty on himself when necessary and removes his hat to shake hands with his opponent, regardless of the outcome. It is the best of sportsmanship and the best of human nature.

And so the majority of fans at the Ryder Cup, on both sides, knew it proper to root for their team and not against the other. But there was a minority – the boisterous few – who instead thought it appropriate to make noise during an opposing player’s swing or to yell vile obscenities at him or his wife. The main target of these offenses was Team Europe’s star, Rory McIlroy. I offer his words from the victor’s press conference.

“I think golf should be held to a higher standard than what was seen out there this week. Golf has the ability to unite people. Golf teaches you very good life lessons. It teaches you etiquette. It teaches you how to play by the rules. It teaches you how to respect people.”

I think many of us are so unsettled by seeing poor behavior around golf, like that exhibited by some of our fans, because golf seems to be the last best public sanctuary of etiquette, good life lessons, and mutual respect in a world where increasingly those things don’t exist. So with golf, we hold on desperately even as the decay in decorum seeps into our beloved game.

Justin Thomas, one of the stars of our team was quintessentially American – brash perhaps, bold definitely, but ultimately fair. He was the head cheerleader when he or a teammate made a great shot. No one revved up that New York crowd like he did. But he also put his hands in the air to quiet those same fans so the European’s had a fair chance to make a great shot in return. He fought his heart out to win his final match on Sunday, which he did. But later when Shane Lowry holed his putt on the last to secure the win for Europe, Thomas, seeing what that accomplishment meant to Lowry, was the first American to come onto the green to congratulate him. Quintessentially American.

Fitness for Duty:

Secretary of Defense, sorry Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth summoned hundreds of our flag officers to Virginia this week for a televised “show.” He spoke for 45 minutes. Well-prepared and practiced, the message centered on his view of what constitutes fitness for duty and his belief that the military be returned to a meritocracy. The villain of the day was, not surprisingly in a MAGA administration, wokeness.

This made for television show cost tax payers millions to assemble, lodge, and protect those assembled. That is in addition to the cost to taxpayers of renaming that department that will only be renamed when the next Democratic president comes into office.

President Trump also spoke, for 0ver an hour, to these men and women who have risked everything for us. Most of us who have given the time to watching an entire speech or press conference of his know of the absurdity of some of his meanderings. But highlighting some from this one is necessary because of who his audience was and what they represent. Again, keep in mind that these men and women had just heard a 45-minute speech on fitness for duty.

The President congratulated himself on renaming the Gulf of Mexico; talked about the rigged election claiming he is actually the 45^th, 46^th, and 47^th President; referred to “nuclear” as the other “n” word you can’t say; claimed that everybody loves his signature; reiterated that “tariff” is the most beautiful word; told them they had to count on people like him to keep them out of wars; said it makes sense for Canada to become our 51st state; told them the ships they’re building aren’t aesthetically pleasing enough to him; told them he got the highest numbers of votes ever received, won every swing state, won the popular vote, “won everything”; called the gathered media “sleaze bags”; called the public servants surrounding President Biden “radical left lunatics”; said DC was worse than Afghanistan; mused that they should use dangerous US cities for military training grounds; said the governor of Illinois is “so stupid they threw him out of his family business”; claimed some criminals may have been born that way; claimed that every day President Biden fell down stairs and said the only thing he respected about President Obama was that he would “bop down those stairs, but he did a lousy job as president”; exclaimed “a year ago we were a dead country”; and finally, in reference to the fired generals, he said “We got many of you out of here because we weren’t satisfied; we know everything about everyone.”

Government Shutdown:

One need not be an arbitrator to understand that the first rule of conflict resolution is that no one gets everything they want.

Yet Republicans continue to believe they can institute their political worldview to the exclusion of Democrats and Democrats continue to forget that they are in the minority. Both forget there will always be another election, and the electorate has a finicky way of reminding them where they have fallen short. That reminder usually revolves around the pocketbook. And perhaps no issue is affecting the American pocketbook more than health insurance, the very issue on which Democrats are holding out.

This shutdown, like every other, will end with an agreement not measurably different than what could have happened without shutdown. All that will be left is figuring out who voters will hold responsible. Will they blame the Republicans who hold the White House and both chambers of Congress? Or will they blame the Democrats, particularly Senate Minority Leader Schumer who is protecting himself from a possible primary challenge on his left? My guess, 50/50 based on your media outlet of choice.

Television this week has been rife with hypocrisy with members of Congress on both sides saying the exact opposite of what they have in the past. My favorite has been watching members of my party say that Democrats always expected the health insurance tax credits to lapse and that is why they didn’t make them permanent. That is like saying the Republicans always intended for the Trump tax cuts to lapse and that is why they didn’t make them permanent. Neither is true. Both were required to lapse because both used the reconciliation process, not regular order, to pass things unilaterally. The truth is reconciliation limits the creation of deficits when using this process, and both parties as an end-around made the policies sunset before those limits were hit.

We have to start talking about the real costs of shutdowns.

And I don’t mean the cliched video footage of the first graders denied a chance to visit something on a field trip or vacationers denied a chance to visit a national park. (Though I would argue that the stupidity of shutdowns is proven when an area of government that is actually done exceedingly well – the national park system – is affected.) I don’t mean scaring seniors that somehow their benefits may be affected. I don’t mean the stress on some federal workers who keep us safe – like air traffic controllers – being forced to work without pay. And I don’t even mean the further chipping away, real or perceived, at the full faith and credit of the United States. No, I mean the actual hard dollar costs of a shutdown that rob taxpayers of their hard-earned money.

In preparation for a shutdown, whether or not it even comes to fruition, federal agencies spend millions of dollars, dollars that should have been spent on whatever mission it is they exist to effectuate. If Republicans believe that the federal government is too big and that certain agencies are unnecessary, then certainly an unnecessary agency or employee working to prepare for a shutdown is, well, unnecessary. But it happens…every time.

Furloughed federal employees get backpay when the government reopens after a shutdown. In the 2013 shutdown, for example, over $2 billion went out after the fact to furloughed employees. That money was doled out in return for zero productivity. The American taxpayer got nothing in return for it.

There is something inherently evil about letting furloughed employees sit at home with nothing to think about except whether their jobs will ultimately be taken away by someone who so callously speaks of culling the size of federal government without due concern to the human beings involved.

And that is exactly how OMB Director, Russell Vought, elected by no one, approaches this. Vought was a key contributor to Project 2025, the playbook for a second Trump term that then candidate Trump disavowed. Putting that aside for now, what do you think the first thing a furloughed employee does, not knowing how long this will last or when their backpay will come? They stop spending.

Those employees aren’t the only ones who stop spending. Because the government stops paying vendors, those businesses stop spending. Because projects are delayed by stalled regularity approvals or SBA loans, new investment into the economy slows. Investment delayed is economic productivity never achieved. GDP falls as a result. In the 2018 shutdown that continued into 2019, GDP fell by some $11 billion according to the Congressional Budget Office. Unforced errors are the worst kind of error. And it is precisely this level of economic uncertainty, whether from shutdowns or tariffs, that causes such angst to the Federal Reserve at a time all of us would like to see rates come down.

While demagogues are demonizing the size of government and painting every federal worker as someone working to either give your money to a killer from another country with a different skin tone or trying to figure out how to use inclusion of “them” to somehow exclude you, the inconvenient truth is that the federal workforce is comprised of the same number of people now as it was when I was born 52 years ago. It has less employees now than did it at certain times under both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. When one factors in population growth, federal employees now make up a smaller percentage of our nation’s overall workforce. I know that complicates my party’s narrative, particularly given that federal employee salary and benefits are less than $400 billion of our $7 trillion dollar annual spend.

What has grown dramatically over the years, and will continue to grow if the result of this shutdown is terminating federal workers, is the number of private contractors our government uses. And while the private sector can do many things better than the public sector, they require turning a profit. Further, I don’t think anyone would argue that using contractors increases transparency or accountability, two things important to most voters. No, instead it increases the likelihood of patronage and cronyism, and the waste that typically accompanies it.

Another reminder, and yet more costs:

Finally, to those who think those on the other side of the political aisle are the enemy, that your opponent in politics is to be hated, that we should further demonize each other, something else happened this past weekend that should remind us what hatred actually looks like. Hundreds gathered in worship only to find themselves screening children behind them as a man rammed his truck into their church, opened fire, and burned the church to the ground. And so we have more costs…lost lives, lives that will never again be the same, and the financial costs across our society to further protect us from instances like this instead of addressing the root causes.