Interactive demo · sample data only
Is the U.S. federal government shut down?
No — the government is open.
All appropriated agencies are funded and operating normally.
Historical timeline · sample shutdowns
16
days
Oct 1–17, 2013
ObamaStandoff over ACA funding closed non-essential agencies for over two weeks.
3
days
Jan 20–23, 2018
TrumpBrief lapse over immigration policy and DACA, resolved after a weekend.
35
days
Dec 22, 2018 – Jan 25, 2019
TrumpLongest shutdown in U.S. history, driven by a dispute over border wall funding.
5
days
Oct 1–17, 1996
ClintonOne of several 1990s budget standoffs between the White House and Congress.
5
days
Nov 13–19, 1995
ClintonPreceded the longer Dec 1995–Jan 1996 shutdown over balanced-budget negotiations.
What it is
IsTheGovernmentClosed is a real-time tracker that answers one question as plainly as possible: is the U.S. federal government shut down right now? The site live-scrapes OPM.gov and Congress.gov, cross-references a curated database of every shutdown since 1976, and renders a bold, color-coded answer — green for open, amber for a partial shutdown, red for a full shutdown — along with a running day counter while a shutdown is active.
Beyond the live status, the site includes a full historical timeline of shutdowns dating back to 1976, with breakdowns by president, so a visitor can see how the current situation compares to past standoffs. The frontend auto-refreshes every 15 minutes, and a dynamic Open Graph image is generated on the fly so that whenever the link is shared on social media, the preview card itself reflects the current status instead of a static screenshot.
How it works
The backend is a small Node.js/Express service that scrapes OPM.gov and Congress.gov with Axios and Cheerio, parses the relevant appropriations and operating-status language, and normalizes it into a simple state machine: open, partial, or shut down. That state feeds a vanilla HTML/CSS/JS frontend — no framework overhead for a single-purpose status page — and a Sharp-based image pipeline that renders the dynamic OG preview image for whatever the current status is. The whole thing runs on AWS Amplify.
The demo above is a self-contained rebuild of that core experience for this portfolio: a status card with the same three states and day counter, a compact sample timeline, and simulate buttons so you can flip between states without needing live government data. All the data in the demo is fabricated/sample; the real site's numbers come from live scraping.
Why it's fun
It's a small project with a real answer to a real, recurring question — the kind of thing that spikes in traffic every time Congress runs up against a funding deadline. It's also a nice example of doing a lot with a little: a scraper, a state machine, a handful of static assets, and a dynamic image pipeline, deployed cheaply and reliably without a heavy framework.
The site is live at isthegovernmentclosed.com, and the source is public on GitHub.