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SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said the state is prepared to keep national parks open during a potential government shutdown that could start this Friday, at midnight.
A congressional deal for a short-term spending bill quickly collapsed on Wednesday under the weight of unrelated provisions and pressure from President-elect Donald Trump and his allies just 48 hours after it was proposed.
During his monthly press conference on Thursday, the governor called out federal lawmakers for frequently forcing states to pick up the slack on government funding and urged Congress to prioritize coalition building over narrow partisan politics.
"It's just embarrassing," Cox said. "We know that the only way we can get something done is if there's a disaster looming. That's no way to run a country."
The rejection of House Speaker Mike Johnson's months-long effort of crafting a continuing resolution, or CR, to fund the government through March 14 came "as a little bit of a surprise," according to Cox, who said he was on the phone with Utah's entire congressional delegation on Thursday as the deal fell apart.
Why did the short-term spending bill fail?
Johnson had attempted to curry Democratic favor in the closely divided House by including pricy provisions that had nothing to do with basic government operations. But Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance and the heads of Trump's government efficiency advisory body, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, urged Republicans to vote against the bill over the billions of dollars in new spending for disaster relief, farmer subsidies and a significant salary increase for lawmakers.
Some GOP lawmakers have proposed a shorter CR with no strings attached. But it is uncertain whether a new deal can be struck before funding runs out for non-essential federal employees. According to Cox, there is no winner in the argument between those who say it is irresponsible to let the government shut down and those who say it is irresponsible to support a 1,500-page bill filled with "pork," government handouts and political favors.
"Everybody's right on this," Cox said. "And this is the problem, these are conversations and debates that should have been happening a month ago, not a day or two before the government shuts down, right before Christmas."
There is still the possibility that a funding agreement is reached, Cox pointed out. And if it doesn't, the state has contingency plans it can "dust off" that have been in place for several years to ensure that national parks do not close in the case of government shutdowns, which, Cox noted, have become increasingly common.
If the shutdown looks like it will be for an extended period of time, Cox said he will need to engage in conversations with Utah's representatives in Washington, D.C., about what other federal programs will need to be temporarily propped up on the state's dime.
Can Congress avoid future shutdowns?
Cox is not optimistic that this problem will go away anytime soon, he said, considering the small majorities Republicans will have in Congress and the lack of political will to pursue policies that garner broad-based support from a diverse set of lawmakers. Just this week, an important bipartisan piece of permitting reform that would have fast-tracked transmission projects and federal leases was discarded after failing to find consensus on the funding package, Cox said.
What's needed is for lawmakers to increase their ambitions from passing legislation along party lines, to crafting bills that draw a wide coalition of lawmakers, Cox said. Otherwise, "we set ourselves up for a disaster."
"I do wish that we had a party — I would like it to be my party, of course, but either party — that was really looking at true coalition building," Cox said. "I believe that there is an exhausted majority out there that are desperate for an abundance agenda and real leadership and neither party has seemed interested in tapping into that because we don't learn any lessons from elections."
It is easy for parties to ignore those lessons and simply blame the other side, or external factors, when elections are so close, Cox said, as they have been for two decades in this country. But refusing to take electoral results into account is what leads to the uncompromising approach among legislators that almost always seems to end up at a dead end, he said.
"That's not real leadership," Cox said. "And so I'm hoping that there will be some lessons learned in this election, and we can start building coalitions again, because that's what the Constitution requires of us."