Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent

I read budget hearings for pleasure, which is a confession, and I want to begin with the thing that nobody covering this shutdown has bothered to say, which is that 2018 was the best year for the federal appropriations process in a decade. Five of the twelve spending bills, including the two biggest, Defense and the one that funds Labor, Health, and Education, were signed before the fiscal year started in October. That had not happened since 2007. Three-quarters of the government is funded through next September and is operating normally this week. The shutdown that began at midnight last Friday covers the other quarter, nine departments, about eight hundred thousand people, and it is happening not because the appropriations process broke but because it worked right up to the last bill, and the last bill had the wall in it. I say that first because the question asks what the shutdown says about the state of budget negotiations, and the honest answer is that the negotiations were fine. The President was not.

Let me describe the hand, because I have watched a lot of people play it badly and this one was played about as badly as I have seen. On December 11 the President sat in the Oval Office with the two Democratic leaders and the cameras rolling and said he would be proud to shut the government down over the wall, which is the one sentence a player should never say out loud, because it tells the other side that the pot is yours to lose. On December 19 the Senate passed a clean bill by voice vote, which means every Republican senator was told the President would sign it and went home. On December 20 a handful of radio hosts and a cable channel called the President weak, and he reversed, and the House passed a bill with five point seven billion for the wall that everyone knew could not pass the Senate. At midnight on the twenty-first the government closed. On Christmas the President said it would stay closed until he got the wall. And on January 3 the other party takes the House and will pass the Senate’s clean bill on the first day, which puts the President in the position of vetoing a bill that his own Senate already passed. That is not a negotiation. That is a man who raised on a hand he had already shown, after telling the table he would.

Now the thing I actually think this says about Washington, which is more interesting than the sequence. A shutdown is a bet that the other side will blink first, and the bet only works if the public blames the other side. The President has already said, on camera, that he would own this one. The polling I have seen this week puts the blame on him and the Republicans by something like two to one. The federal workers, the ones in this town who run the airport screening and the ones at the national parks and the ones at Nellis who are civilians, are working without pay through Christmas, and every one of them has a story for the local news. The Democrats, who could not organize a two-car parade for most of this year, have been handed a position that requires them to do nothing but stand still, and standing still is the one thing a minority party can always manage. The shutdown will end when the President finds a way to describe a loss as a win, and he is good at that, so it will end, but it will not end with five point seven billion dollars.

On the immigration side, which is the half of the question that matters longer, I will say what I see from a state that is thirty percent Hispanic and has just elected a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators. The wall was the one specific promise of the 2016 campaign, and it is the promise that has been least kept, because it was never a policy; it was a picture. The administration has built a few miles of replacement fencing and no new wall, Congress has appropriated money for barriers in every spending bill and none for the thing in the picture, and the President’s own supporters, which is what the December 20 reversal was about, have noticed. The shutdown is the President trying to keep the picture alive before the House changes hands and the picture becomes impossible. He is right that this is his last window. He is wrong that the window was ever open; the votes for a wall did not exist in a Republican Congress and they will not exist in a divided one, and the immigration debate will now move, as it has been moving all year, to the questions that actually have constituencies: the asylum backlog, the caravan, the family separation that this administration tried and reversed in June, and the DACA population that the courts have kept in limbo. The wall is not on that list. It is on a hat.

From the business side, one observation. The Dow lost six hundred and fifty points on Christmas Eve and gained a thousand on the twenty-sixth, which is the kind of swing that tells you the market has stopped pricing the shutdown and started pricing the question of whether anyone is in charge. The Defense Secretary resigned last week. The chief of staff is acting. The Treasury Secretary called the banks on a Sunday to ask whether they had liquidity, which nobody had asked. The shutdown is a symptom. The market is reacting to the disease, and the disease is a government whose decisions depend on what was said on television the night before.

So my answer is that the shutdown says the budget process is healthier than it has been in years and the presidency is less predictable than it has ever been, and that the second fact is now the thing that drives the first. On immigration it says that the wall has become a hostage the President cannot afford to release and cannot afford to keep, and that the Democrats have learned they can win by letting him hold it. The hand will be folded in January. The player will say he won. The federal workers will get back pay. And the next shutdown, whenever it comes, will start from the lesson everyone learned this week, which is that a threat made on camera is a threat you have to carry out, and carrying it out is how you lose. In this town we have a word for a player who cannot stop raising after the table has read him. He is a regular. He keeps coming back, and the house keeps letting him.

Prescott Valley, Arizona Correspondent

I live in a border state, and I want to say at the outset that the thing the President is asking for is not absurd. Arizona has three hundred and seventy miles of international boundary, much of it open desert, and the people who live along it, the ranchers in Cochise County and the townspeople in Nogales and Douglas, have been asking for a secure border for thirty years under presidents of both parties and have been told, each time, that it was coming. Some of it did come. There is fencing along most of the Arizona line now, built mostly under the 2006 act that Senators Schumer and Obama and Clinton voted for. The question has never been whether there should be a barrier. It has been where, what kind, and who pays. So when the Democratic leadership says a wall is immoral, I hear that the way the people in Cochise County hear it, which is as a statement by people who have never had to drive a cattle truck past a group of men who crossed in the night and are sitting under a mesquite tree waiting for a pickup. The demand is not the problem. The method is, and the method is what the question is about.

Let me take the method, then, and I will try to be as plain as my former students would want. The President wants five point seven billion dollars for the wall. Congress has been appropriating money for border barriers for years, including in this administration, and the amount has run around one and a half billion a year. The gap between what was offered and what was demanded is a few billion dollars in a four-trillion-dollar budget, and the President decided that gap was worth closing nine departments and sending eight hundred thousand people home or to work without pay over Christmas. He announced that decision in the Oval Office on December 11, in front of cameras, in words that his own party’s senators spent the next week trying to walk back. He then let the Senate pass a clean bill, let his senators go home, and reversed the next morning after the radio hosts called him weak. That sequence tells me what I used to tell a student who had made a scene in class and then could not find a way to sit down: the problem is not what you wanted. It is that you said it in a way that left you no exit.

What does it say about budget negotiations? I think it says something that has been true for a while and that this episode made visible, which is that the appropriations process can work when the President stays out of it. Congress passed five of twelve spending bills on time this fall, the first time in more than a decade, and the Senate was prepared to pass a clean bill for the rest by voice vote. The machinery functioned. It functioned because the members on both sides had learned from the shutdowns of 2013 and January 2018 that the public punishes the side that closes the doors, and they had decided not to be that side. The one actor who had not learned that lesson, or who had learned it and decided it did not apply to him, is the one who closed the doors. The process is not broken. It is being overridden by a man who regards it as a stage.

What does it say about immigration politics? Here I will push back a little on the people who are enjoying this week, because I think they are misreading it. The Democrats are winning the shutdown. They will take the House on January 3 and pass the Senate’s clean bill on the first day, and the President will have to decide whether to veto a bill his own party already approved. That is a tactical victory and I do not begrudge them. But the position they are winning from is that there should be no new money for a barrier at all, and that position does not hold in Arizona. The people who split their tickets in Arizona in November, and there were a great many of them, did not vote for an open border. They voted against a wall that was a slogan and for a border that is managed, and the difference is one that neither party in Washington has shown any interest in learning. The Democrats will win this round by refusing. They will lose the next one if refusing is all they have.

I taught special education for a long time, and the thing I would most want the people in Washington to understand is that the people paying for this are not abstractions. There are two thousand federal employees in Yavapai County, at the national forest and the VA and the post office and the courthouse, and some of them are working without pay this week and some of them are home wondering whether the back pay will come. The Border Patrol agents the President says he is fighting for are among the ones working without a check. The TSA screeners at Sky Harbor are too. That is who a shutdown lands on: not the Senate, not the Speaker, not the President, who cancelled a vacation and called it a sacrifice, but the people who were told to come in anyway and were told the check would come later. A special education teacher learns to ask who is actually being served by a decision and who is being used as the lesson. This week, the lesson is being taught on the backs of the people who had the least to do with it.

So my answer is that the shutdown says the budget process works and the presidency does not respect it, and that immigration politics has calcified into two slogans, a wall and no wall, neither of which describes what a border state actually needs. The President will lose this fight, because he announced in advance that he would own it and because his last window closes on January 3. The Democrats will win it, and will learn the wrong lesson, which is that refusing is a policy. And the people of Cochise County will go on waiting for the thing they have been promised for thirty years, which is a border that someone in Washington treats as a place rather than a picture. I would give the whole episode a failing grade, and I would write the same note on it that I wrote on a great many papers: you knew the answer. You chose the fight instead.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent

I work in a county public-works shop, which means I have spent my career inside a budget process that does not get to shut down. If the county commission and the mayor cannot agree on the road budget by July, the roads do not close; the department runs on last year’s numbers while the adults argue, because the alternative is potholes with nobody’s name on them. I bring that up because I think the first thing the shutdown says about Washington is that it has built a budget process with a self-destruct switch, and then acted surprised, three times in twelve months, when somebody pushed it. No state does this. No county does this. No utility does this. The federal government is the only large organization in the country that has designed its own operations to stop if a negotiation fails, and the people who designed it that way are the same people who are now on television blaming each other for the result.

That is the structural point, and I want to make it before the political one, because the political one is easier and less important. Here is the political one. The President told the Democratic leaders on December 11, on camera, that he would be proud to shut the government down over the wall. The Senate passed a clean bill on December 19 by voice vote, which means his own party’s senators understood he would sign it. The next morning a few people on the radio called him weak, and he changed his mind, and the House passed a wall bill that could not pass the Senate, and the doors closed at midnight on the twenty-first. On Christmas he said it would stay closed until he got the wall. On January 3 the other party takes the House and passes the Senate’s clean bill, and he is left vetoing something his own side already approved. I have sat across the table from a utility that discovered public comment was not the same as public consent, and I know what it looks like when somebody mistakes an announcement for a decision. That is what this is.

Now what it says about budget negotiations, and here I will give some credit where the coverage has not. The appropriations process in 2018 was the best it has been in a decade. Five of the twelve bills, including the biggest ones, were signed before the fiscal year started, and the rest were ready to go on a clean extension that the Senate had already passed. The committees did their jobs. The members who had lived through the 2013 shutdown and the January one had learned the lesson and were not going to repeat it. The system worked, right up until it reached the one person who does not sit in the committees and does not answer to the members, and he pushed the switch. So the shutdown does not say the process is broken. It says the process has a single point of failure, and the single point of failure has a television in the room.

What it says about immigration is less flattering to everybody. The wall was the clearest promise of the 2016 campaign and it is the least kept, because it was never a plan; it was an image, and Congress has spent two years funding fencing and calling it something else while the President demanded a wall and got pictures of fencing. The five point seven billion dollars he is asking for is a few billion more than what has been appropriated every year for barriers, and the Democrats could have given it to him in a package with something they wanted, the DACA population or the asylum backlog or more immigration judges, and both sides could have gone home with something. They tried that in January and it fell apart. They have not tried since, because both sides have decided that the fight is worth more than the deal. That is the actual state of immigration politics: not a disagreement about the border, which could be negotiated, but an agreement by both parties that negotiating it would cost them more than fighting about it.

I will say what that looks like from the rural end of Knox County, which sends its labor into the city and gets lectures back. The people out there are not against a border. Most of them would have taken the wall money as part of a deal that fixed the visa system that the nurseries and the construction crews actually depend on, and they do not understand why that deal is impossible. What they see is a President who closed the government for a picture and a Congress that would rather lose the picture than give him the deal, and eight hundred thousand people who did not vote on any of it working without pay. The national park up the road is open with no rangers. The federal courthouse downtown is running on reserves that end in January. The TVA, which is federal but self-funded, is fine, which tells you something about what a sensible structure looks like.

So my answer is that the shutdown says two things. The first is that the budget process works when it is left alone and that Washington has given one man a switch that lets him not leave it alone. The second is that immigration politics has reached the point where both parties would rather have the issue than the solution, and the wall is the perfect issue because it can be neither built nor abandoned. The shutdown will end in January when the President finds a sentence that lets him call a loss a win. The structure that allowed it will not change, because changing it would require Congress to give up the one thing it uses as leverage against presidents, which is the threat to let the lights go out. I run a shop where the lights stay on while people argue. I would recommend it. Nobody in Washington will ask.

Owatonna, Minnesota Correspondent

I am going to take the President’s side of this for a few paragraphs, not because I think he has played it well, which he has not, but because I think the people enjoying his predicament this week have forgotten what the predicament is, and a financial planner learns early that the client who is doing something foolish usually has a reason that the adviser has not bothered to understand. The reason here is leverage. The President promised a wall. Congress, under his own party, gave him money for fencing and called it barriers and sent him pictures. The Democrats take the House in six days and have said they will give him nothing, ever, for anything that can be called a wall. His leverage over the next two years consists of the veto and the shutdown, and the shutdown is the only one that forces the other side to the table. He used it in the last week he could. That is not insanity. It is a man cashing the only chip he has left before the table closes, and the people mocking him for it would do the same thing with a client’s portfolio if the alternative was watching it go to zero.

Now let me say why it will not work, because the reason is also one a financial planner would recognize. A chip is only worth what the other side thinks you will do with it, and the President told the other side on December 11, on camera, that he would be proud to shut the government down. A client who tells the counterparty he is happy to walk away has told the counterparty that walking away costs him nothing, and the counterparty, reasonably, lets him walk. The Democrats have done exactly that. They have done nothing, said nothing new, and watched the polling move against the President by two to one, and on January 3 they will pass the clean bill the Senate already passed and dare him to veto it. He will fold, and he will find a sentence that describes folding as winning, and the sentence will work with his supporters for a while, because that is what the sentences are for.

What does this say about budget negotiations? Two things, and the first is the one I find more interesting. The appropriations process in 2018 worked better than it has since the financial crisis: five bills signed on time, the rest ready on a clean extension, committees doing their jobs. The process was not the problem. The second thing is the cost, which nobody on either side mentions because both sides are responsible for the structure that produces it. The 2013 shutdown, by the budget office’s estimate, cost the economy something over two billion dollars in lost output and the government several hundred million in back pay for work that was not done. This one is smaller in scope, a quarter of the government, but it is running through the holidays and into the new year, and the eight hundred thousand people affected are not spending, not travelling, and in some cases not making the mortgage payment in January. The President is demanding five point seven billion for the wall. If the shutdown runs three weeks, the cost of demanding it will approach the thing demanded. That is the arithmetic, and it is the kind of arithmetic that makes a planner tell a client that the fight is not worth the fee.

On immigration politics I want to say something that the coverage has not, because I have followed this long enough to remember the votes. In 2006, a Senate that included Senators Schumer, Obama, and Clinton voted for seven hundred miles of fencing. In 2013, the Gang of Eight bill that every Democratic senator supported included forty billion dollars for border security, including hundreds of miles of new barrier, as the price of a path to citizenship. The Democratic Party was for a wall, under another name, when the wall came with something it wanted. It is against a wall now because the wall comes with this President, and that is politics, and I do not hold it against them, but I would ask the people calling the wall immoral this week to explain which year it became so. The honest state of immigration politics is that both parties know what the deal is, a barrier for a legalization, and both have decided that their voters would rather have the fight. The President cannot make the deal because his base calls any legalization amnesty. The Democrats cannot make it because their base calls any barrier a wall. The deal sits on the table, as it has since 2013, and both sides walk past it to the cameras.

I will add one thing from Minnesota, which has a Somali community that this President has made a point of attacking and a farm economy that depends on labor the visa system does not supply. The people here are not confused about what they want. They want the border controlled, the visa system to work, and the people who have been here twenty years to stop living in fear of a knock on the door. That is the deal. It is not complicated. It is just unprofitable, politically, for anyone in Washington to make it, and the shutdown is the clearest demonstration yet that both parties prefer the leverage to the agreement.

So my answer is that the shutdown says the budget process is sound and the structure around it is absurd, that the President used the only leverage he had and used it after telling the other side it was free, and that immigration politics has become a standoff in which the deal everyone can see is the deal nobody will sign. He will lose this round, because he announced in advance that he would own it. The Democrats will win it by doing nothing, which they will mistake for a strategy. And the eight hundred thousand people who were told to come to work without a check will be paid eventually, which is the one certain outcome, and which costs more than the thing the whole fight was about. I have advised clients against fights like this. They rarely listen either.

Dayton, Ohio Correspondent

Wright-Patterson is funded. I want to start there because it is the fact about this shutdown that the national coverage keeps getting wrong, and because it tells you something about how the process actually worked this year. The Defense bill was signed in September, on time, for the first time in a decade, along with four others, so the base that employs thirty thousand people in this county is open, the civilians are paid, and the contractors are working. What is closed is the other quarter of the government: the national park service, the IRS, the Department of Agriculture that runs the farm programs for the counties around us, the FAA’s non-essential functions, the federal courthouse’s reserves, Transportation, HUD, and so on. Eight hundred thousand people, about half sent home and half told to work without pay. That is the scope, and I want to describe it precisely, because a process engineer learns that the first thing to do with a failure is to find out exactly which part failed, and in this case the part that failed was the last bill, not the process.

Here is the sequence, which I will keep short because every correspondent will have it. The President said on December 11 that he would be proud to close the government over the wall. The Senate passed a clean bill on the nineteenth by voice, which means his party’s senators were told he would sign. He reversed on the twentieth after criticism from the people he listens to on television. The House passed a wall bill that could not pass the Senate. Midnight on the twenty-first, the doors closed. Christmas, he said it stays closed until he gets the wall. January 3, the other party takes the House and passes the Senate’s bill. That is a failure sequence, and if I were writing the root-cause report I would note that every step was predictable from the step before it and that the operator was warned at each one.

Now the part that I think matters more than the sequence, which is what a shutdown does to the people who are the process. In my plant, if we told four hundred people to come in and run the line and told them the check would come when management settled an argument, we would have a line that ran badly and a workforce that remembered. The federal government has done that to four hundred thousand people this week, the ones classed as essential, who are working at the airports and the border and the prisons and the weather service with no pay and no date. It has sent another four hundred thousand home. Both groups will, by precedent, be paid in full when this ends, which means the taxpayer buys the work that was not done and the work that was done, at the same price, and gets nothing extra for either. The contractors are different. The janitors and the cafeteria workers and the security guards who work for companies that bill the government do not get back pay, because they are not federal employees, and nobody in either party has ever fixed that. Those are the people in Dayton I think about: not the ones who will be made whole, but the ones who will not, and who are the lowest-paid people in the building.

What does it say about budget negotiations? I think it says that the negotiations are not the problem and never were. Congress produced the best appropriations year since the financial crisis. The members had learned from the two shutdowns earlier in this cycle that the public blames the side that closes the doors, and they had organized themselves not to be that side. The failure was upstream of the negotiation, in a decision made by one person in response to what was said about him on television, and no process redesign fixes that, because the process cannot control what the President watches at night. What could fix it is the thing every state in the union already has, which is an automatic continuation at last year’s levels when the deadline passes, so that the argument continues and the lights stay on. Bills to do that have been introduced for years. They do not pass, because both parties want the shutdown as a weapon, and a weapon that both sides want is a weapon that stays loaded.

What does it say about immigration? Less than people think, I suspect. The wall is a five point seven billion dollar line item that the President cannot build in the time he has and the Democrats cannot concede without a revolt, and both sides know it, which is why the fight is about the number and not about the border. The border has real problems: an asylum system that cannot process the people in it, a caravan that showed the system cannot manage a few thousand arrivals at once, a workforce in agriculture and construction that the visa system does not supply, and a population of long-term residents that the courts have kept in limbo for two years. Every one of those could be negotiated. None of them is being negotiated, because the wall is the thing that can be put on a sign, and both parties have discovered that a sign wins more votes than a settlement. The shutdown says that the parties have decided the issue is worth more to them unresolved. That is the most honest thing I can say about it, and it is not a hopeful thing.

So my answer is that the shutdown says the process works and the person at the top of it does not respect it, that the cost lands on the people with the least say in it, and that immigration politics has become a standoff over a symbol while the actual border goes unmanaged. The fight will end in January when the President finds a way to call retreat a victory, and he will, and the back pay will go out, and the contractors will eat the loss, and the next deadline will come in a few weeks with the same switch sitting on the same table. I have seen a lot of root-cause reports filed and then ignored. This one will be too. The failure mode is known. The operator just does not care to fix it.

Sydney, Australia Correspondent

Australia had a shutdown once. In 1975 the Senate blocked supply to the Whitlam government, the money to run the public service was weeks from running out, and the Governor-General dismissed the Prime Minister and called an election. It was the gravest constitutional crisis in the country’s history, it is still argued about forty-three years later, and it has never happened again, because every politician who lived through it concluded that using the budget as a hostage was a weapon too dangerous to keep in the arsenal. The United States, by contrast, has now had three shutdowns in a single calendar year, the parties treat the threat as an ordinary tool of negotiation, and the current one began with the President announcing on camera that he would be proud to cause it. From outside, that is the thing the shutdown says most clearly about the state of American budget negotiations: the country has normalised a failure mode that every other developed democracy regards as a system breakdown, and has done so to the point where the people inside it no longer notice.

Let me be fair to the American system before I criticise it, because there is a reason the failure mode exists. The separation of powers means that the President cannot simply pass a budget, as a prime minister with a majority can, and that Congress cannot simply spend without the President’s signature. The design intends friction. What the design did not intend, and what Congress added by statute in the twentieth century, is the rule that when the friction stops the money, the government must stop too. Most federal systems, including ours, carry on at the previous year’s level while the argument continues. The American rule converts a political disagreement into an operational shutdown, and both parties have kept it because each believes it can use it against the other. That belief is usually wrong. The side that closes the doors is the side the public blames, and the polling this week has the President and his party carrying the blame by roughly two to one, which is exactly what happened to the Republicans in 2013 and to the Democrats in January.

Now the particular case, which I will summarise because the sequence is already familiar. A clean bill passed the Senate without objection on 19 December. The President reversed the next day under pressure from his media supporters. The House passed a wall bill that the Senate could not. The government closed on the twenty-second. The President said on Christmas Day that it would remain closed until the wall was funded. On 3 January the new Democratic majority will pass the Senate’s bill, and the President will be left to veto a measure his own party already approved. Everything about that sequence was foreseeable, and the people who foresaw it included the Republican senators who went home on the nineteenth believing the matter was settled. The shutdown was not a negotiating failure. It was a decision made after the negotiation had succeeded, by the one actor who had not participated in it.

On immigration I will offer the Australian comparison, because it is more relevant than Americans may assume and because it cuts in a direction that may surprise them. Australia has the most restrictive border regime of any liberal democracy. We turn back boats, we detain arrivals offshore, and the policy has bipartisan support that no American party could imagine. We also run one of the largest skilled migration programmes in the world relative to population, and that too has bipartisan support. The two policies coexist because the political class settled, after a decade of bitter argument, on the principle that the public will accept high migration if it believes the government controls who comes. That settlement is what the American system has been unable to reach. The President’s wall is a demand for visible control; the Democrats’ refusal is a demand that control not take that form; and neither side has been willing to trade the one for the other, as the Senate attempted in 2013 and as every serious proposal since has suggested. The shutdown is the most expensive possible way of demonstrating that the trade remains unmade.

I should add a word on the economics, since the question concerns budget negotiations and the markets have been watching. The American equity market fell more than six hundred points on Christmas Eve and rose over a thousand two days later, which is not a reaction to a partial shutdown of nine departments. It is a reaction to the accumulation of signals about decision-making at the top: a Defence Secretary resigning over a withdrawal from Syria announced on Twitter, a Treasury Secretary telephoning banks on a Sunday to ask about their liquidity, a chief of staff who is acting, and a shutdown begun after the President’s own party had resolved the matter. Foreign investors do not price the wall. They price the question of whether the world’s reserve currency is issued by a government that can carry out its own decisions, and this week the answer was unclear.

So my assessment is that the shutdown says the American budget process is structurally sound and procedurally reckless: sound because Congress completed most of its appropriations on time for the first time in years, reckless because the system permits a single actor to convert a settled negotiation into an operational crisis and both parties have chosen to keep that permission. On immigration it says that the United States has not reached the settlement that Australia reached fifteen years ago, between visible control and open admission, and that the absence of the settlement is costing it a functioning government over a line item worth a fraction of one percent of the budget. The crisis will end in January with the President describing a retreat as a victory. The structure will not change. And the next time an Australian politician proposes blocking supply, someone will mention 1975, and the proposal will die. Americans have no such memory, because they have made the failure routine, and routines are the hardest things in politics to end.

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Correspondent

The shutdown happened on a Thursday morning in December because of what was said on television the night before and on the radio that morning, and I want to talk about that, because it is the part of the story I actually understand and because I think it is the part that says the most about where politics is right now. On Wednesday the nineteenth the Senate passed a clean bill and the White House let it be known the President would sign it. That night and the next morning, a columnist who had been one of the President’s earliest supporters called his presidency a joke, the biggest radio host in the country said he had caved, and the morning show the President watches ran a segment on the betrayal. By midday Thursday the President had reversed. The House Republicans were told to pass a wall bill. The doors closed at midnight Friday. I run social media for small businesses, and I can tell you that I have never seen a brand reverse a decision that fast on the strength of a few influencers, and I have seen some fast reversals. That is not a budget negotiation. That is a client managing a comment section.

Here is why I do not think that is as crazy as it sounds, and I am going to defend the President’s base for a minute, because somebody should. The wall was the promise. Not one of several; the promise, the thing the rallies chanted, the image on the hats. Two years in, the administration has built replacement fencing and called it a wall, Congress has appropriated money for barriers and called it something else, and the people who were promised the picture have been watching the picture not appear. When the Senate passed a clean bill and the President was about to sign it, those people were not reacting to a budget document. They were reacting to the moment the promise was going to be quietly dropped, in the last week it could have been kept, and they said so, loudly, through the channels that reach him. From a marketing standpoint, the base did exactly what an engaged audience is supposed to do: it held the brand to the thing it said. The problem is not that the President listened. It is that he listened at the one moment when listening cost him the most, after his own senators had gone home believing it was settled.

So what does that say about budget negotiations? I think it says that the negotiations in Washington now happen in two rooms, the one with the senators and the one with the audience, and the second room has a veto over the first. The appropriations committees did their work this year, better than they had in a decade, and the Senate had a deal, and none of it mattered once the second room weighed in. That is a structural change and I do not think it reverses, because the channels that produced it are not going away and the next president of either party will be living in the same house with the same television. The people who are shocked by this week have not been paying attention to how every other institution in the country has been working since about 2012. Companies, universities, and sports leagues have all learned that the audience can override the board. The federal budget just learned it too.

On immigration, I will say what I see from the Grand Strand, which runs on seasonal labor that the visa system has never supplied and never will, and where every hotel and restaurant owner I work with has a story about the H-2B cap and the workers who did not come. The wall is not a policy for any of them. The visa system is. And the shutdown, which is nominally about the border, has nothing to say about the thing the actual economy of this coast needs. That is the honest state of immigration politics: the President has a picture, the Democrats have a refusal, and the business owners who have been begging both parties for a functioning visa program for fifteen years are, as usual, not in either room. The wall fight will end in January with the President calling a loss a win, because that is what he is good at and because the base will accept it, since the base is not in it for the wall. It is in it for the fight, and the fight is what it got.

One observation from the technology side, since that is what I follow. The President’s reversal on the twentieth was driven by cable and radio, which are old media, and the thing that will drive the end of the shutdown is social, which is new: the federal workers posting their situations, the TSA agents and the park rangers and the Coast Guard families, in a format that travels faster than any press release and lands harder. The administration understands the first channel and does not understand the second, and the second is the one that moves the public that the first does not reach. The polling already has the blame on the President two to one. By the time the House passes the clean bill on the third, the stories from the airports will have done the rest.

So my answer is that the shutdown says the budget process has acquired a second decision-maker, the audience, which can override a done deal in a morning, and that immigration politics has become a performance in which the people who need an actual policy are not cast. The President kept the fight because the base demanded it, and the base demanded it because the fight was the promise, and the people paying for the promise are working the holidays without a check. I would tell a client not to let the comment section run the company. The President does not have a client. He has an audience, and this week the audience ran the government, and it will not be the last time.

Novi, Michigan Correspondent

I want to treat the wall the way I would treat any capital request that landed on my desk, because I think the fight over it has been conducted entirely in symbols and almost nobody has asked the questions a purchasing manager asks: what does the money buy, how long does it take, and what is the alternative that gets most of the benefit for less. The President is asking for five point seven billion dollars. The administration’s own estimates run around twenty-five million dollars a mile for new steel bollard barrier in the easier terrain, and a great deal more in the Rio Grande valley, where the land is private and the river moves. Five point seven billion is therefore something on the order of two hundred miles, out of a two-thousand-mile border, of which about six hundred and fifty miles already have some kind of fence from the 2006 act. Before a single mile goes up in Texas, the government has to condemn land from ranchers who have been fighting the last round of condemnations in court for a decade. On any realistic schedule, the money being demanded this week would produce a small fraction of the picture the President promised, several years from now, and the people who know that best are the ones in the Border Patrol who have been saying for years that they want barriers in specific places, sensors and roads and agents in others, and that a wall from sea to sea was never on their list.

So the first thing the shutdown says is that a capital decision that should be made on a map is being made on a hat. I do not say that to dismiss the border. I think the border needs barriers in more places than it has them, I think the asylum system is being used by people who are not refugees, and I think the Democrats who call every fence a wall are being as dishonest as the Republicans who call every fence a wall. But I run supply chains, and in my world a project that cannot be specified cannot be funded, and the wall has never been specified. It is a number attached to an image, and the shutdown is a fight about the number because nobody can agree on the image.

Now the sequence, which I will keep short. The President said he would own a shutdown. The Senate passed a clean bill. The President reversed after a bad morning on television. The House passed a bill that could not pass the Senate. The government closed. The President said it stays closed until he gets the wall. The new House passes the clean bill on January 3 and the President is left to veto his own Senate’s work. That is a decision reversed after the parties had agreed, and in my business a customer who cancels a purchase order after the supplier has tooled up does not get a better price next time. He gets a supplier who waits to see whether the order is real.

What does it say about budget negotiations? The honest answer, which the coverage is not giving, is that the negotiations produced the best appropriations year since 2007: five of twelve bills signed on time, including the big ones, and the rest ready on a clean extension. The committees worked. What failed is the one step in the process that no committee controls, and it failed because the President treats the signature as the beginning of the negotiation rather than the end of it. That is a lesson every senator who voted for the clean bill on the nineteenth has now learned, and it will change how they deal with him for two years. A supplier who has been burned once asks for the deposit up front. The Senate will too.

What does it say about immigration politics? Here I want to say something in the President’s favor, because I think it is true and because my fellow correspondents may not. The Democrats are winning this week by doing nothing, and they will take the House in six days and pass the clean bill and dare him to veto it, and he will fold. But a party that wins by refusing has not solved anything, and the thing it is refusing, barriers in specific places as part of a larger deal, is a thing most of its own senators voted for in 2013. The deal has been on the table for five years: barriers and enforcement for the Republicans, legalization for the long-term residents for the Democrats, and a visa system that works for the employers in both parties’ states. Michigan’s farms and Michigan’s auto plants both depend on that visa system and both have been told to wait. The shutdown is not a failure to reach that deal. It is a demonstration that neither party wants to, because each has a base that prefers the fight, and the President’s base told him so, loudly, on the morning of the twentieth.

I coach youth soccer and I have two kids in elementary school, and the thing I think about this week is the practical one: the eight hundred thousand people who were told to work without pay or go home, through Christmas, over a capital request that could not be built on the schedule anyone imagines. Those people will be made whole. The contractors who clean the federal buildings will not. And the border will look exactly the same on January 15 as it did on December 15, because nothing in this fight was ever going to change it.

So my answer is that the shutdown says the budget process works until it reaches the one actor who treats a settled deal as an opening bid, and that immigration politics has reduced a solvable engineering and staffing problem to a fight over a number nobody can spend. The President will lose the fight, because he announced in advance that it was his, and the Democrats will win it, and neither of them will build anything or fix anything, and the people who do the actual work of the government will have paid for the demonstration. I have sat through a lot of meetings where the capital request was denied because nobody could say what it bought. This is that meeting, with the lights off.