This story was produced as part of the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. It first appeared at cpr.org.
No one blinked. So much of the federal government has shut down.
Congressional Republicans and Democrats remained dug in their positions over federal funding and shut down the government at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday with no solution in sight.
If there was one point of agreement, it was that the other side was to blame.
“The House passed a clean, bipartisan funding bill to keep the government open,” said Colorado Republican Rep. Jeff Crank, adding it was up to Senate Democrats’ to prevent a government shutdown.
“If there’s a shutdown, it’s because Democrats chose politics over common sense,” GOP Rep. Jeff Hurd said on social media Tuesday before the shutdown.
GOP Rep. Gabe Evans wrote on social media that Senate Democrats “blocked the bill to keep America open. Now they’re to blame for the shutdown.”
Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette said that “Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans are happy to let the government shutdown and let you pay more for health care.”
Democratic Rep. Brittany Pettersen joined many House Democrats who hammered House Republicans for not being at the U.S. Capitol as the government was shutting down. “We are here, ready to work, ready to find a solution and a path forward. And I think it’s negligent that we’re not all here together to do the same,” Pettersen said.
She noted that Republicans knew that Democratic votes were going to be needed in the Senate to pass a spending bill and that Democrats should have been part of the negotiations.
In the hours leading up to the shutdown, the Senate once again tried and failed to pass a seven-week temporary funding measure that the House passed a week and a half ago. Only three Democrats voted for that bill. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats also failed to get their temporary government funding bill passed: It included health care fixes that Republicans balked at.
“Millions are about to lose their health care, and now President Trump wants to shut down the government too,” said Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper. “Democrats are ready to work with Republicans to lower costs and restore health care for millions of Americans. Instead, Republicans rubber-stamped an agenda that’ll make Americans poorer and sicker.”
While Senators were in D.C. voting, and House Democrats were also in Washington, House Republicans remained in their districts back home. Speaker Mike Johnson is not expected to bring the chamber back for further business until Monday.
It’s a position that GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert supports, according to her spokesperson. “The House did their job to keep the government open,” the spokesman said.
With a shutdown in effect, the executive branch has a lot of leeway to make decisions on what to keep open and what to cut. President Donald Trump could also follow through with his threat to fire instead of furlough government employees deemed non-essential during the shutdown.
"We're doing well as a country so the last thing we want to do is shut it down,” Trump said Tuesday. “But a lot of good can come down from shutdowns. We get rid of a lot of things that we didn't want, and they'd be Democrat things.”
Health care is the center of this shutdown
Democrats’ main ask is an extension of a tax credit that helps people who buy health insurance on the Obamacare marketplaces. Without it, many Coloradans will see their insurance premiums soar. While the tax credit expires at the end of the year, many people will have to make decisions on whether they can afford health insurance for next year when open enrollment starts on November 1.
Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet described the expiring credits as “hugely problematic.”
And he said lawmakers should deal with it now, not push the problem down the road.
“If we don’t act now, nothing’s going to change now except people are going to be worried that their premiums are going to go up,” said Bennet. “For no other reason, that’s the reason we should act now. The issues aren’t going to change between now and later. We might as well get to a decision point now.”
Democrats also want to see Medicaid cuts rolled back that were included in the Republicans' signature “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which they are now calling the Working Families Tax Cut. That is unlikely to happen, even as some Republicans expressed concerns over the Medicaid cuts.
Republicans have falsely accused Democrats’ of wanting to provide free health care for “illegals.”
“Democrats are holding the government hostage because illegals won't get taxpayer funded health care,” Crank wrote on social media. Evans also took to X to write, “Democrats are threatening a shutdown because we won’t fund their extreme priorities like taxpayer funded benefits for illegal immigrants.That’s unacceptable.”
The Democratic proposal does not provide free health care or benefits for undocumented immigrants. They are not eligible for the Obamacare tax credit, or federal Medicaid or Medicare. The “Alien Medicaid Eligibility” section of the One Big Beautiful Bill ended Medicaid eligibility — starting in Oct. 2026 — for some immigrants like refugees and those seeking asylum, and left in place such coverage only for lawful permanent residents, certain Cuban or Haitian immigrants and Citizens of Freely Associated States. It did not deal with undocumented immigrants.
Still, this funding fight is a change-up. In recent years, it’s been Democrats advocating for clean, short-term funding bills until a government funding package could be passed, and Republicans wanting policy changes.
Hurd stressed that the so-called “continuing resolution” (CR) was a continuation of spending Democrats supported in March. But none of Colorado’s Democrats voted for that bill.
DeGette countered that it wasn’t a “clean” CR and had “huge cuts to many different programs including health care.”
“It’s only a clean CR to them because [Republicans] all voted for it,” she said. “That’s not a bipartisan compromise.
What leaders close to home are watching for
Gov. Jared Polis said his top priority is keeping Rocky Mountain National Park open.
“Rocky Mountain National Park is a major draw for visitors from around the world, especially now during leaf-peeping season, and a major economic driver for Colorado’s rural communities and others like it,” Polis said in a written statement.
He signed an executive order in 2022 — which has not expired — that would require the Colorado Department of Natural Resources to develop a plan for continued operations for the state’s four national parks in the face of a federal shutdown.
“Here in Colorado, we are evaluating all options, and are a willing partner if needed, to use limited State funds to keep our biggest park fully operational if necessary,” Polis said.
The Trump administration plans on keeping the parks open with minimal staff, like it did during the 2018-2019 shutdown. It’s a move that former National Park Leaders opposed, pointing to damage done to the parks during that time.
According to the Interior Department’s shutdown guidance, park roads, lookouts, trails and open-air memorials will “generally remain accessible to visitors.” And National Parks that collect fees are allowed to use them, “to provide basic visitor services in a manner that maintains restrooms and sanitation, trash collection, road maintenance, campground operations, law enforcement and emergency operations, and staffing entrance gates as necessary to provide critical safety information.”
The guidance added that if visitor access becomes a safety, health or resource protection issue, “the area must be closed.”
Fall is still a busy time of year for the state’s national parks. According to the state, while the most visited days are in the summer months, September and October ranked fourth and fifth respectively for the calendar year. Last September and October, Colorado’s National Parks and Monuments welcomed visitors to the tune of an estimated 1.66 million visit days.
The state said the National Park Service and RMNP have not yet determined how they will approach a shutdown or know the exact impact to the parks system.
At Great Sand Dunes National Park on Tuesday, the Visitor Center and parking lots were busy and filled with people from as far away as Florida and Washington, D.C.
A drive through the campground revealed dozens of sites occupied and even more reserved. Rangers at the Visitor Center were fielding questions Tuesday afternoon from visitors concerned about the park closing because of the shutdown, and a number of campers said rangers had not been able to offer any clarity about what might take place Wednesday and thereafter.
Scott and Traci Craner, of Missouri, who said they’ve been living out of their motor home for six years, were among the steady stream of those who stopped for selfies at the park’s entrance sign. They said they understood the possibility existed for a government shutdown on Wednesday, but they didn’t call ahead. “We’re pretty flexible with the way that we travel, so if something does shut down, we can re-orient, fortunately.”
Scott Craner said he hoped that rangers would be able to stay on duty in case of a shutdown. “Not monitoring the parks can be a little bit dangerous for people,” Craner said. “It’s important to have people give you guidelines on how to traverse through here, I think a lot of people would need to do a lot a lot of homework and if they didn’t, I think it would be a little bit of danger.”
How does this end?
This will be the third government shutdown while Trump has been in office. The first one was only three days long and under Republican leadership of the White House and both chambers of Congress. It stemmed from a stalemate over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
The longest government shutdown, that time over funding for Trump’s border wall, started in December 2018, again with Republicans in control. But that changed a couple of weeks later, when a new Congress was sworn in and Democrats regained control of the House and negotiations began in earnest.
DeGette, the dean of the Colorado delegation, has been through three shutdowns during her congressional career. She’s not sure how long or short this one will be. But she does think once people start getting the increased health insurance rates, “they’re going to start screaming at the members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, and we’ll sit down and talk.”
Republican Senate Leader John Thune had a different take. Pass the temporary funding measure, and then talks over extending the tax credit, with reforms, can happen after the government is reopened, he said.
CPR’s Hart Van Denburg contributed to this report from the Great Sand Dunes.
