Government Shutdown Day 11: Thin Gruel

Us Feds are still hanging in there

The WaPo is running a long End Of Week Two Story about the government shutdown (here), and I fully agree with this part:

The federal government has become the behemoth that cried wolf. For more than two decades, budget brinksmanship has been such a mainstay of Washington politics that many Americans long ago grew skeptical of claims that if one deal or another weren’t made, the Statue of Liberty would close or the nation’s highways would seize up in the mother of all gridlocks.

-- snip --

But the reality is that the government is too large and too complex for something as dramatic as a shutdown to cause anything as dramatic as an actual shutdown. At the peak of this latest closing, 800,000 out of about 1.9 million civilian federal employees were put on ice. Many arms of government still had half, three-quarters or even nine-tenths of their workers coming in every day, despite the closing of the money spigot.

"The government is too large and too complex for something as dramatic as a shutdown to cause anything as dramatic as an actual shutdown." Um .. okay .. if that means what I think it means, I agree. The administration has to dramatize the real shutdown - that is, the budget impasse - by staging a phony shutdown. Hence, the passive-aggressive nonsense of roping off open air monuments on the Washington Mall and scenic overlooks in national parks to make the impasse visible to Joe Citizen.

Would Joe Citizen otherwise notice the shutdown that some parts of the federal government are not at work? Truthfully, no. Not unless he's employed by the feds either directly or via a contractor, or married to someone who is, or gets a check from some social program or other, or works for a business that gets regulated. That's a lot of people, but not nearly so many as the Washington hive assumes.

Meanwhile, I'm warming up my soup.

The Crisis Continues