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I’m watching Washington choke the lifeblood out of the economy while insisting it’s all unavoidable. With federal funding lapsing on October 1, 2025, large swaths of the government are in shutdown mode even as the Treasury General Account balloons toward the trillion-dollar mark — cash parked and out of circulation while paychecks pause.
The mechanics are simple and ugly: the Treasury is issuing debt and stacking cash into the TGA to make sure it can meet obligations during a funding impasse, and that stack of idle dollars is literally sucking liquidity from the banking system. Markets sensitive to short-term funding have already reacted, with money-market strains that spike borrowing costs and make life harder for small banks and Main Street lenders.
When the Fed has to restart overnight repo operations to inject roughly $30 billion back into the market, you know the plumbing is clogged. Short-term funding spreads have widened noticeably, and that ripple hits ordinary businesses first — higher rates for lines of credit, choked lending, and frozen expansion plans.
Meanwhile, real people are suffering while Congress plays chicken. Federal employees and contractors are going without pay, and the Defense Department has even accepted emergency donations to cover troop pay in the face of a prolonged standoff — a humiliating sign of political dysfunction. Families, small business owners, and service workers don’t get to postpone mortgage payments because someone in D.C. wants a policy win.
This isn’t accidental paralysis; it’s political theater with economic casualties. Democrats in Congress who refuse pragmatic budget deals while pointing fingers are gambling with livelihoods and asking the rest of the country to absorb the fallout. The result is not just chaos — it’s a predictable policy choice with winners and losers, and ordinary citizens are not the intended beneficiaries.
Republican leaders and the White House must stop treating reopening the government as a negotiation tactic to be sacrificed for optics. Restoring spending, releasing the Treasury’s hoarded cash back into circulation, and stabilizing funding markets should be immediate priorities if there’s any hope of preventing the temporary squeeze from becoming a sustained downturn.
Voters should not forget who presided over this manufactured crisis when they go to the ballot box. Economic pain has consequences at grocery stores, factories, and small shops across the country, and the people who engineered this standoff should be held accountable for the damage they knowingly inflict.
