The Impending Shutdown

[My employer, the United States Government, has been operating without a budget since October 1, 2011.  Funding expires Friday night at midnight.  If Congress cannot either agree on a budget or pass another Continuing Resolution containing a temporary extension, the government will shut down at 00:01 hours on Saturday.]




First of all, it's not a shutdown.  Congress is still funding the parts of the government that have public contact.  There will still be FBI surveillance of our telephone calls.  There will still be air traffic control and prison guards and open border crossings and weather forecasts and tsunami warnings and, um,  oh yeah:  war.  There will still be war.  Congress is very careful to make sure that the shutdown will have practically no visible impact to its constituents.  That way, it can fuel the myth that the government doesn't actually do anything--they shut it down and no one noticed.  Ha Ha.

Second of all, it's not about the money.  If it was about the money, they'd do a real shutdown.  If it was about the money, then we'd be talking about shutdowns when the President is a Republican, not just when the President is a Democrat.    If it was about the money, really about the money, then Congress would be eliminating pork and programs, increasing tax enforcement, raising grazing fees and oil&gas royalties, raising taxes, etc. etc.

Third, it's not like the shutdownees have been swimming in cash lately.   My agency hasn't been able to buy office supplies.  I've been buying my own pens, pencils, and post-its for a couple of years.  I reuse folders five or six times and I've opened two bags of 50 paperclips during my career and used the same 100 paper clips over and over.  We ditched the law library because it was too expensive to maintain and we don't buy copies of our governing laws to the employees who use them every day because they cost too much.  I'm not complaining.  I choose better pens than the supply clerk anyway and my old statute book (the one with the split binding so it's now in two parts and I keep a rubber band around it) opens right up to the pages I want in a way that new books don't.  My point is that there are no luxuries here to begin with.

Fourth, those of us with the desk jobs who are getting sent home are here for a reason.  My agency exists because Congress created it, not because it fell out of the sky.   If Congress thinks we don't do anything worthwhile, then Congress should abolish us.  The gagillions of dollars that Uncle Sam spends on auditing government travel are spent because Congress demands this level of oversight.  The government needs people who keep the lights on, pay bills, keep personnel records, run the computers, give grants and let contracts,  keep the books, and make sure there's toilet paper in the restrooms just like private business or any other organization.

Fifth, it's one thing to ask my family to go without a paycheck or two.  We won't like that, but we're prepared and we can deal, assuming Kirby doesn't need another MRI.  The people who are really screwed are the low-earning feds who live paycheck to paycheck.  Is it really fair that a Secretary earning $35,000 a year has to bear the burden of this political football?   Oh wait.  There aren't any secretaries any more.  We fired all the secretaries in the nineties when the Republican Congress demanded that the Democratic President reduce the size of government.   No secretaries means that lawyers do their own photocopying and envelope stuffing.  More time spent on that kind of stuff means less time for lawyering.  That means we need more lawyers to make up for the fact that there aren't any secretaries.  Lawyers are a lot more expensive than secretaries.  Therefore, we fired secretaries to save money, which resulted in spending more money so people could be their own secretaries.   But my point was that the shutdown is going to have the greatest direct impact on those employees who can least afford it.  It isn't right.

I hope we do shut down for a while.  I can afford it and I could use a couple extra days off.  But I'm disgusted by how all of this is playing out.  The whole drama is completely dishonest, designed to mislead voters into thinking it's something that it's not.  Smaller government?  Sure.  Fine.  But let's go about it honestly and treat the voters like intelligent adults, shall we?

/rant