NEW YORK — The U.S. government shutdown is now the longest on record, breaking the previous record of 35 days on Wednesday, as lawmakers remain deadlocked over funding the federal budget — an impasse that could be compounded by Tuesday night’s sweeping victory for Democrats in an off-year election.
Expectations had grown that Democrats could give in to their demands and vote to fund the government as early as this week or early next week without winning concessions in their efforts to counter health care premiums that rose this month. But Tuesday’s election could further delay any deal between elected officials, people following the process told CoinDesk, pointing to the amount of support Democrats received above expectations in the polls. And this delay may, by extension, further push out further work on crypto market structure legislation.
One policymaker said they expect Tuesday’s election results to push back any deal-making at several levels, but a markup of the market structure by Thanksgiving was still possible.
Another person who works in politics similarly said that it would be possible for Congress to pass legislation on market structure, but it was not likely to happen by the end of 2025 – although they said that it is possible that this legislation will pass through both houses of Congress by the end of 2026.
As CoinDesk has reported, the longer the shutdown lasts, the less likely market structure legislation will move through Congress. Summer Mersinger, executive director of the Blockchain Association, said Wednesday that the extended shutdown means that this bill will be more likely to be moved to 2026.
Many of the government’s experts in that arena have been laid off during the shutdown, leaving fewer people able to actually craft the legislative language, the people have said.
Patrick Witt, the White House executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Digital Assets, told an audience at Ripple’s Swell conference on Wednesday that President Donald Trump still wants to see a final market structure bill on his desk by the end of 2025.
“We continue to apply pressure and hold regular meetings,” he said. “I spend most of my time on Capitol Hill these days meeting with senators from both sides to get it done. I’m optimistic that we’ve seen enough progress recently that the trend line is moving in the right direction.”
The government shutdown helped in one way, he said on stage and in a later conversation with CoinDesk TV, in that it gave lawmakers time to meet with his team to discuss the details of the bill.
“We’ve had an opportunity to really engage with offices [and] staff and members about the substance of this bill in a way that we might not have been able to otherwise if there had been a lot of other competing priorities,” he said.
