The following is a statement from Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, in light of events leading to today’s government shutdown:

“The 115th Congress has now taken its place in a select group of dysfunctional legislators, whether or not they want to.

As with their predecessors, this Congress has behaved like a procrastinating high school senior – waiting until the last minute, and now facing a long list of to-dos. Congress has not even agreed on total funding levels, let alone specifics, and the Senate Appropriations Committee has held only one full committee hearing since July. Except there’s a lot more than a bad grade on the line.

Congress’ inability to get it together costs taxpayers in both dollars and lost work. A shutdown disrupts salaries and hiring decisions, keeps agencies from budgeting or implementing new initiatives, and shuts the public out of everything from parks and libraries to passport, visa, and mortgage approvals. And stopgap funding bills are an incredibly inefficient way to run the government. Americans deserve less grandstanding and more lawmaking from their elected officials.

Maybe this shutdown will force members to take the broken appropriations process more seriously. The alternative, their inability to reach a compromise – this shutdown was the fourth possibility in as many months – means that dysfunction and inefficiency are guaranteed. As a perverse consequence, lawmakers who rail against a wasteful and inefficient government are ensuring that they get exactly that with continuing resolutions.

p.s. We’ve had so many opportunities to write about CRs and shutdowns that we had to inventory and actually whittle down all the blog posts, columns, and op-eds, from 2013 on alone. It’s a dubious distinction, one that no legislative body or lawmaker should want to own.”

— Ryan Alexander, president of TCS