Hello, everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams.

Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

And at least when we're recording, we are still in the midst of a partial government shutdown,

a.k.a aka lapse in appropriation.

Yes, indeed, as of October 1st, parts of the federal government did indeed shut down.

And there's no clear end in sight.

And, you know, if it feels like we've been here before, it's because we have been here before.

Funding for the federal government has become a constant battle for Congress, and it has us

wondering, why are we like this? And a while back, with another shutdown on the horizon, we talked to

Molly Reynolds, who's interim vice president and director of

governance studies at the Brookings Institution about the mechanics of the federal budget process,

and she's joining me again today to break down why things have become so non-functioning,

shall we say. Molly, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me.

Okay, why are we like this?

So there's a question about why are we like this generally, and there's a question about why are we like this right now in this moment?

So generally, one of the reasons that it has gotten so difficult for Congress to complete its work on the appropriations process on time, which is to say before the federal government's new fiscal year begins every October 1st, is because in our very divided, very partisan Congress, the appropriations process has come to bear

more and more of Congress's political conflict. So there's lots of things that Congress doesn't do,

lots of areas it doesn't legislate in because it is hard to do so because they're sort of beset

by gridlock. But the appropriations process is the

thing that has to happen or else the government shuts down like we're seeing as we speak.

And so because it has this kind of must-pass status, it's become, to use that sort of

transportation metaphor, it's become one of the few trains that

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