I believe (and I hope someone corrects me if I'm wrong) but the Anti-Deficiency act [0] is what is causing most of the issues. It specifically forbades going ov

I believe (and I hope someone corrects me if I'm wrong) but the Anti-Deficiency act [0] is what is causing most of the issues. It specifically forbades going over the budget allocated by congress and has ramifications if it does. In general, the shutdown affects mostly non-essential federal workers, but part of that is their pay, so the offices that pay the necessary workers are not issuing checks... But, let's be clear, this isn't the government running out of money, it's the government not agreeing on how to spend the money it has. It's actually all bureaucracy and generally the budget bills are mostly simple continuances of the former... however, in recent years, this has become a game of chicken with legislatures. They are using federal pay as a pawn in negotiations to get their pet projects passed. In this particular case, instead of going the normal legislative route of passing a bill to allocate funds for the "wall" trump has both inflicted harm on federal workers and DACA recipients in order to coerce the legislative body to fund 5.7 billion in the wall. How did he do this? He first rescinded protections for a group of people and then vetoed a normal budget bill. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act