Governing by Stopgap: Continuing Resolutions and the Federal Personnel Pipeline

• In Event: Federal-State Capacity and Intergovernmental Implementation

Abstract

Continuing resolutions (CRs) inject budgetary uncertainty and legal constraints that push agencies toward delay, risk aversion, and the suspension of discretionary commitments, characteristic responses of cutback management under fiscal stress. Over the past two decades, not a single federal fiscal year has begun with all regular appropriations enacted on time, making CRs a routine feature of American governance rather than an exceptional one. Prior research documents that CRs slow procurement and trigger end-of-year spending sprints, yet we know little about how they reshape government's most basic capacity: the personnel who design and deliver public services. Building on recent evidence that government shutdowns disrupt staffing and degrade implementation, we argue that CRs operate as milder but chronic "uncertainty shocks" that occupy the middle of a continuum of budgetary dysfunction, less severe than shutdowns but more persistent and potentially more cumulative in their organizational effects.

We analyze a panel of 694 federal agencies observed monthly over 253 months (January 2005–January 2026), drawing on administrative personnel records from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management merged with a purpose-built calendar of all CR and government shutdown periods. To isolate the CR effect, we estimate agency fixed-effects panel models with controls for seasonal and fiscal-year variation. We estimate contemporaneous and distributed-lag specifications to trace how disruptions unfold over subsequent months, and conduct separate analyses by employment type (permanent vs. non-permanent) to assess heterogeneous vulnerability. While the panel extends through January 2026, we focus our primary analysis on the pre-Trump II period (January 2005–December 2024) to isolate routine CR effects from the large-scale workforce restructuring that characterized the second Trump administration.

We find that a full month under CR reduces agency-level accessions by 12 to 16 percent, with effects persisting and deepening through at least four months of lagged exposure. Separations also rise modestly (7 to 12 percent), though the net effect on workforce flows is unambiguously negative, driven primarily by accession suppression rather than attrition. The accession penalty is substantially larger and more persistent for permanent than non-permanent employees, consistent with the longer recruitment pipelines and deeper institutional investments that characterize career civil service hiring. While ideological alignment with the incumbent administration does not buffer the aggregate CR accession penalty, it confers higher baseline hiring rates in non-CR periods and moderates the CR effect for non-permanent hiring, the employment category most amenable to political discretion.

Findings carry broad implications for theories of cutback management, bureaucratic capacity, and democratic governance. By extending the CR conversation from contracts to personnel, the study shows that chronic budgetary dysfunction cascades into workforce capacity in ways prior research has not documented. The cumulative net inflow deficits observed across hundreds of agencies over two decades offer a concrete mechanism linking stopgap governance to long-run federal capacity erosion, connecting to recent evidence of organizational performance deterioration in U.S. federal agencies.

Authors

• Yongjin Ahn, Sungkyunkwan University
  Presenting Author

• William G Resh, Georgia State University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author