The White House has asked Congress to enact authority for the government to continue operating if regular appropriations bills haven’t been passed by the start of a new fiscal year, saying the deadline hasn’t been met in 21 of the last 22 years. In most of those cases, special stopgap measures were enacted, but in several cases agencies were required to suspend operations and send employees home unpaid because the agency lacked funds. In each case employees later were paid as if they had worked, but the shutdowns were widely decried as needlessly disruptive. Under the proposal, if no funding measure is in place, funding would be automatically provided at the lower of the President’s budget or the prior year’s level.