Government shutdown: Washington, D.C. November 2025

Abstract/exposition Washington, D.C. in November 2025 was in the midst of the longest federal government shutdown in United States history, as Congress had failed to produce legislation that kept the coffers open. Many federal services were either halted or curtailed (NPR Network, 2025). In August 2025, President Trump declared a “crime emergency” in Washington and deployed National Guard troops to the city under the guise of crime-fighting (Lopez, 2025), despite the government’s own data demonstrating the city’s violent crime rate was at record lows (United States Attorney’s Office, 2025). As visitors to the city, we were thus ensconced in a peculiar political landscape shaped by visible spending on militarized law enforcement and locked doors to other federal departments.