Today is September 30, the date Congress set as the deadline for full year federal funding, and if lawmakers do not reach an agreement, the government heads into a funding lapse at midnight. For most people that sounds like distant Washington noise. For a hospitality employer with an Italian chef, sommelier or hotel manager's visa case already in motion, the more useful question is what a funding lapse actually touches, and what it leaves alone.
This is not a hypothetical. A similar deadline last fall led to a funding lapse that ran from October 1 through November 13, 2025, forty three days in total, making it the longest government shutdown in US history. It also gave a real, testable answer to the question every hospitality employer eventually asks: does a shutdown actually stop a work visa.
What Kept Moving
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services runs almost entirely on the fees employers and petitioners pay, not on the annual appropriations Congress argues over, so petition processing, biometrics and interviews continued through last year's lapse. The State Department funds its consular operations the same way, so embassies and consulates kept holding visa interviews too, including the ones handling J-1, H-2B and other categories hospitality employers rely on.
What actually paused was the Department of Labor's Office of Foreign Labor Certification, the office that confirms there are not enough local workers available before an H-2B petition or a green card case can move forward. That office depends on the same appropriations Congress fights over every year, so new certification requests sat still for the weeks the lapse lasted. Existing cases did not disappear. They waited.
The Part That Got Fixed
The Department of Labor restored its foreign labor certification systems before October was out, weeks before the broader shutdown ended, and worked through the backlog that had built up in the meantime. USCIS separately gave H-2B, H-2A and other affected petitioners flexibility on deadlines that a shutdown had made impossible to meet, treating the delay as the extraordinary circumstance it plainly was. Nobody's case went back to the start. It just took longer than it should have to move again.
We build our own filing calendar at ItalianExperience around exactly this kind of risk, timing labor certifications and petitions early enough in a hospitality employer's hiring window that a few weeks lost to a budget fight in Washington becomes a delay we can absorb rather than a season we miss, whether the case in front of us is an H-2B certification, an EB-3 green card, or the nulla osta on the Italian side of the same hire.
Data referenced from USAFacts, the National Association of Development Organizations, and Ogletree Deakins.
A government can pause. A hiring plan with enough runway built in does not have to.