On December 22, 2018, Donald Trump had ordered a partial shutdown of the Government until further notice. The reason for this, at the time, was very unclear. But with further inspection people starting to figure out just why.

During Donald Trump’s entire presidential campaign, his big idea was that he was going to crack down on illegal immigration issues in the U.S. That wall was going to cost a lot of money, and to get it federally funded, he needed to get the Republicans, and the Democrats approval. Well, upon research, he only got the Republicans approval of federally funding the wall. Trump shutdown the government to try and diplomatically persuade the democrats into approving the funding.

The American people at first, had major questions about this. “Shutting down the government for money seemed odd, to say the least.” Meredith Stevenson said. When the government shuts down, it and all of the people that work for the Government, essentially lose their job until they reopen it again.

To make up for people losing their jobs, President Trump said that he would give the workers paid time off, with their pay at their base pay. No one, at first, really seemed that this was going to be an issue, until pay day came around. Some people in the U.S., did not get the pay that the president had promised them. “I work for social security, and when my first pay came around, I did not get any money whatsoever, is the shutdown even worth it at this point?” Jen said.

This lasted for about 2 weeks, people were getting angrier and angrier by the day. It lasted so long that people were not going to get their next set of food stamps because there was not enough government workers to actually hand divide them out in the public. On January 19, 2019, the president offered a compromise to the Democrats. If they approved of the government funding the wall, he would give amnesty to the immigrants that were already here. After about a week or so, on January 25, 2019,  Donald Trump lifted the government shutdown because the unemployment was getting out of hand. At one point it got to above 420,000 people.

The government had to end up paying $3 Billion to their workers, and about $2 Billion in lost tax revenues. “Overall, the government shutdown was for a diplomatic reason, but it got out of hand. Thank god it ended before it became catastrophic.” Jessica said.