“When you have a shutdown, things start to break down pretty rapidly after you get a couple weeks in,” said Sam Berger, a former senior Obama-administration official who helped manage the 2013 government shutdown at the Office of Management and Budget. “Big programs start to run out of money. Things that people depend on run out of money.”

For those reasons, the prospect of major parts of the federal government staying shut for too much longer is virtually inconceivable—even when both parties have dug in as stubbornly as they are now. “Come February, no one will have the political will,” Berger predicted. “I don’t think this is going to be tenable over the long term, because the impacts just grow and grow and grow.” He told me that during the 16-day impasse over the Affordable Care Act in 2013, “we never anticipated a months-long shutdown, because we looked at what will happen.”

The chances that this parade of horribles actually comes to pass remain relatively small. As Berger suggested, mounting political pressure will likely cause one side or the other to fold before the worst happens. Senate Republicans have begun to waver on Trump’s insistence on funding for a border wall, and a presidential declaration of a national emergency to build the barrier without congressional approval could shift the fight to the courts and allow the government to reopen.

Meanwhile, some of the Trump administration’s recent moves signal that it would try to blunt the shutdown’s most painful consequences—efforts that could shield some Americans from its impact but that could stretch the strictures of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits the executive branch from spending funds without appropriations from Congress. Earlier this week, the administration announced that it would dip into visitor-entrance fees to keep many national parks open and at least partially staffed, following widely circulated images of overflowing trash cans on the National Mall and other iconic locales. The Internal Revenue Service said that it would recall furloughed employees to process tax refunds that would otherwise have been delayed. And although funding for food stamps was due to run out at the end of January, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced that the department had found a way to cover the program through the end of February.

“We’re trying to mitigate the impact of the shutdown on everyday Americans instead of the opposite, which I’ve actually seen in the past,” Vice President Mike Pence told reporters on Monday. “And we’ll continue to do that in a manner consistent with the law.”

How much wiggle room does the administration have? Quite a bit, said Chris Lu, a former deputy secretary of labor in the Obama administration who is now a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. There is general agreement that the government has a fair amount of leeway to define what are essential services that need to continue for public health and safety. And paradoxically, that threshold could lead to more of the government reopening even if the shutdown continues. Lu gave the example of routine public-safety inspections on food. If they are stopped for a week or two, the impact would be minimal. But if they’re stopped for more than a month, the administration could determine that this in and of itself constitutes a threat to public health, leading them to restart even if Congress doesn’t act.