Welcome to the 2025 government shutdown, during which every urgent shipment is now a bureaucratic nightmare.
If you’ve been managing mission-critical freight for more than five minutes, you already know the drill. Every shutdown follows the same script: Essential workers stay, everyone else goes home, and your time-critical shipments get caught in the crossfire. Export licenses take forever. Customs crawls. Agricultural inspections basically stop. And as that grounded aircraft burns money by the hour, you’re the one fielding angry calls.
So, what works when the usual channels don’t? Which agencies still process emergency requests? Who’s actually answering phones at customs? What documentation can you prepare now to avoid delays later? Which workarounds won’t land you in regulatory hot water?
It’s not pleasant, but you’ve still got freight to move. Hopefully, when we answer your most pressing questions about the 2025 government shutdown, you can breathe easier.
First rule of shutdown survival: Federal law requires agencies to protect life, health, and property. That sounds great until you realize your export license doesn’t qualify as “life-threatening” and the person who processes it just got furloughed.
Ultimately, enforcement continues, but processing stops or slows. Agencies keep enough staff to prevent disasters, but not enough to prevent delays. Your shipment sits in limbo: important enough to check, not important enough to clear.
CBP officers stay on the job because borders don’t close for budget fights. Ports remain open, cargo gets inspected, and yes, they’ll still collect tariffs. The Automated Commercial Environment keeps running, and you can even get refunds processed.
The catch? All those support staff who speed up documentation reviews and compliance checks are gone. During the 2018-2019 shutdown, dwell times at LA-Long Beach jumped 15-20%. Expect your shipments to sit longer while the skeleton crew works through the backlog. CBP still functions, but at the speed of government on a good day, which means glacial on a shutdown day.
Air traffic controllers keep planes moving because crashes make terrible headlines. FAA safety inspectors stay on duty, so your air cargo operations continue. But forget getting new routes approved or certifications for that cargo aircraft you just leased. Those approvals join the shutdown casualty list.
TSA officers still screen your cargo, though they’re doing it without paychecks. Past shutdowns saw absenteeism spike when security officers decided unpaid work wasn’t worth it. Plan accordingly for delays.
The trucking side fares better. FMCSA and FHWA run on Highway Trust Fund money, not congressional whims, so safety regulations and hours-of-service rules stay enforced. Just don’t expect new hazmat approvals unless someone’s literally dying. PHMSA keeps emergency response teams ready, but puts everything else on ice.
FDA keeps screening imports for immediate health threats, but routine inspections stop cold. Add 72 more to that medical device shipment that typically clears in 24 hours.
USDA plays by different rules. APHIS runs on user fees, meaning your agricultural inspections actually continue. Meat, poultry, and pest inspections keep moving because importers pay for the privilege.
EPA cuts to emergency response only. No new permits, no routine inspections. Same with Fish and Wildlife: enforcement stays at ports to catch smugglers, but CITES permits and endangered species paperwork stop completely.
Export licenses become the shutdown’s biggest casualty. Commerce’s BIS keeps enforcement running, but license processing stops unless national security depends on it. Spoiler: Your aerospace component probably doesn’t qualify.
State’s DDTC follows the same playbook. Defense article exports get reviewed only for urgent national security cases. Everyone else waits.
OFAC keeps sanctions enforcement active because letting that slide would be awkward. But license applications pile up on empty desks. If you need approval to ship to that edge-case country, you’re out of luck.
The Coast Guard keeps 95% of its people working, unpaid but operational. Vessel inspections, facility security, and container checks continue. The stress of working without pay shows, though, so patience goes a long way.
The Federal Maritime Commission? Completely shut. Commissioners stay, everyone else goes home. No new OTI licenses, no foreign registrations, no tariff filings. The statutory clock stops ticking on agreement reviews, which sounds helpful until you realize nothing moves forward either.
Now for the fun part: Everything you actually need to get approved sits on the desk of someone who’s not allowed to come to work. The 2025 government shutdown creates a special kind of bureaucratic purgatory where your urgent requests join thousands of others in the “we’ll get to it eventually” pile.
Commerce stops processing export licenses, commodity classifications, and advisory opinions unless World War III depends on it. Your aerospace parts and dual-use technology exports sit in limbo while the one person who understands ECCN classifications binge watches Netflix at home.
The Federal Maritime Commission goes completely dark, taking your OTI license applications with it. Can’t file new NVOCC registrations, can’t update tariffs, can’t even cancel a bond if you wanted to. If you’re waiting on FMC approval to start operations, congratulations, you’re now indefinitely grounded.
Pharmaceutical premarket reviews stop because they run on user fees, and nobody’s around to process them. Food safety inspections continue only for stuff that might actually kill people. Your new medical device that took three years to develop? Back of the line.
CITES permits vanish. Endangered Species Act approvals disappear. USDA keeps basic inspections running, but anything requiring actual paperwork from the permitting office enters the void.
Emergency approvals only, which means unless your hazmat situation involves imminent explosions, you’re waiting. Routine permits and special authorizations stop cold, leaving your specialized shipments without the paperwork they need to move.
FAA won’t certify new aircraft, pilots, or procedures during the shutdown. Route approvals for cargo operations get shelved. That new freighter you bought? Hope you weren’t planning to use it this quarter.
FMCSA keeps enforcement running, but stops processing new driver applications and compliance audits. Background checks freeze, licensing reviews halt, and your fleet expansion plans hit a wall when you can’t onboard new drivers legally.
Frozen licenses and dead approvals were just the warm-up act. Now comes the main event: watching your AOG parts get trapped in a three-way disaster that makes every shutdown feel like logistics Groundhog Day.
Ports stay open but barely function. CBP officers show up for work, sure. Yet, all those administrative staff who actually know how to process your paperwork are sitting at home. Your documentation joins a mountain of other “urgent” requests on the desk of whoever’s left.
The situation at border crossings makes ports look efficient. Trucks heading to Mexico idle for hours because nobody’s there to run the computers. The ACE system crashes, and guess what, IT support got furloughed. CTPAT audits that keep your trusted shipper status active stop completely. Your just-in-time supply chain becomes a just-too-bad situation.
Air cargo keeps flying, but the screening process turns into amateur hour. TSA staff working without pay start calling in “sick” after week two. The remaining officers move at the speed of people who know their mortgage payment isn’t coming. Your overnight parts become a three-day adventure, assuming they move at all.
Every agency your shipment touches becomes another black hole. FDA adds 72 hours to clearance times, and that’s if you’re lucky. EPA basically ghosts you. USDA keeps basic inspections running, but anything complex waits until the shutdown ends.
Export controls turn especially ugly for aerospace and defense. BIS won’t even look at your license application unless it’s desperate. DDTC treats your urgent defense parts like they’re yesterday’s news. Your mission-critical components sit in warehouses accumulating dust and storage fees while the exact agencies created to facilitate trade become the reason nothing moves.
Meanwhile, the FMC’s complete closure creates its own special brand of mayhem. New freight forwarders ready to help can’t get licensed. Existing ones can’t update registrations or file anything. Companies with contracts in hand find themselves legally prohibited from touching freight. Money evaporates while everyone waits for Washington to remember how to function.
Week one, federal workers grumble but show up. Week two, they start doing the math on their bills. Week three, that CBP officer who usually fast-tracks your shipments decides the unpaid overtime isn’t worth it.
The truck driver shortage, already squeezing the industry, becomes a full-blown crisis. Carriers look at shutdown-related delays, calculate the risk of getting their trucks stuck at borders or ports, and decide to stick with predictable domestic routes instead. Your emergency freight loses the bidding war to regular contracted loads that won’t get caught in government-induced gridlock.
Morale craters across every agency you depend on. Coast Guard inspectors stop rushing. TSA agents stop caring about your deadlines. The person who knows your account, understands your needs, and usually helps you through the system, either stopped showing up or stopped trying. Each missing link in the chain compounds into longer delays, higher costs, and more phone calls explaining why that grounded aircraft still isn’t back in the air.
Enough doom and gloom. You still have aircraft on the ground and parts that need to move. While Congress plays chicken with the budget, here are five proven ways to keep your mission-critical shipments from becoming shutdown casualties.
The 2025 government shutdown proves what you already suspected: Relying on federal agencies to keep your urgent freight moving is like trusting Congress to balance a budget. CBP officers work without pay, export licenses gather dust on empty desks, and that grounded aircraft keeps burning money while you wait for someone, anyone, to stamp your paperwork. You can pad lead times, perfect documentation, and know every skeleton crew member personally. Yet, sometimes you need a partner who treats your AOG crisis like their own emergency.
That’s where Carrier 911 earns its name. While traditional carriers tell you to wait three days for a quote, we get you pricing in 15 minutes and trucks rolling within an hour. Our 24/7 war room monitors every shipment with GPS tracking, operated by humans who answer phones at 3 a.m. and understand that “urgent” means now, not next week. We run sprinter vans for small AOG parts, flatbeds for engines, reefers for temperature-sensitive shipments, and hazmat-certified vehicles for specialized cargo, handling everything from cross-country hauls to final-mile delivery straight to your maintenance hangar.
It’s anyone’s guess when the 2025 government shutdown ends. So stop waiting around. See a Carrier 911 demo today and learn what happens when you partner with a specialist who knows every workaround and has the fleet to execute.
Get a free consultation call with one our specialists.
