Veterans Day usually brings parades, salutes, rifle volleys and crowds lining sidewalks from coast to coast. This year is different as the federal government shutdown is turning patriotic traditions into cancellations.

Communities that typically deck streets with flags are scrapping ceremonies. National cemeteries that host quiet tributes are going silent. Universities that normally stage ROTC vigils are telling cadets to stand down. This is a result of what has been the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, which could soon be over due to eight Senate Democrats crossing the partisan aisle Sunday evening and reaching a deal with Republican leaders in the chamber to get a future vote on Affordable Care subsidies.

Military.com reached out to multiple universities and national cemeteries for comment.

The shutdown is currently freezing official military outreach nationwide. Universities, ROTC detachments and national cemeteries are cancelling Veterans Day ceremonies and parades.

Officials told Military.com that federal rules block service members from taking part in public events during a lapse in funding. Communities from Virginia to Oregon are scrambling, cancelling long-planned tributes and shifting to quiet, private observances instead. Military families are closely watching pay and benefits.

Long-standing traditions in Charlottesville, Portland, San Diego and Michigan are among those canceled.

Military.com asked officials why time-honored ceremonies honoring service members vanished from community calendars. Pentagon and ROTC leaders pointed to a directive that halts all community outreach activity during the shutdown.

Air Force ROTC commanders at the University of Virginia confirmed the ceremony and vigil could not proceed. Capt. Rachael Parks, a spokesperson for the Air Force Jeanne M. Holm Center, told Military.com that Department of War guidance requires all official outreach to stop until funding returns.

Speaking at an event on antisemitism at his Bedminster, New Jersey, estate, Trump was discussing Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire pro-Israel GOP megadonors who set a donation record in 2020 by spending over $170 million. Trump bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Miriam Adelson in 2018 for her history of contributions to U.S. national interests and “world peace.”


“That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian. It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor,” Trump said Thursday. “But [the] civilian version, it’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.”

Trump has a history of making controversial comments about veterans, receiving backlash for them during both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. But now, both parties’ vice presidential candidates are veterans — and as the GOP attacks the service record of the Democratic vice presidential hopeful, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Trump’s comments Thursday gave Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign ammunition for a counterattack.

“Donald Trump knows nothing about service to anyone or anything but himself,” Harris campaign senior spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said Friday in a statement. “For him to insult Medal of Honor recipients, just as he has previously attacked Gold Star families, mocked prisoners of war, and referred to those who lost their lives in service to our country as ‘suckers’ and ‘losers,’ should remind all Americans that we owe it to our service members, our country, and our future to make sure Donald Trump is never our nation’s commander in chief again.”

VoteVets, a progressive veterans’ PAC, claimed Friday in a statement that “Donald Trump hates Veterans and their sacrifice, because he looks so small in comparison to them.”

In a statement to POLITICO, senior Trump campaign adviser Brian Hughes said “It’s outrageous that [Harris] and her failing campaign have the audacity to claim concern for service men and women.” He blasted the vice president for “being the last one in the room with Biden as they set in motion our disastrous retreat from Afghanistan.”

In 2015, Trump made headlines when he asserted that the Arizona Republican senator and former presidential candidate John McCain, who spent five and a half years being tortured as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, was “not a war hero” because “I like people who were not captured.” President Joe Biden posthumously granted McCain the Medal of Freedom in 2022.