re: Gubment Shutdown Chaos Ensues Gif Thread

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Ah the expected "yeah but remember what Obama did?!" comment.

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The point being that Obama made a spectacle of the shutdown.

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Why do we have non-essential services in the first place??

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It’s not “non-essential”. The way they classify it is by safety. Essential employees are essential because of the sector they are in, for instance park rangers, police departments, etc. non-essential are employees like secretaries and administrative people. The Gov can go a SHORT while without the non essential employees, but it will hurt in the long run. I think the DMV is non-esse tisk as well.

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It’s not “non-essential”. The way they classify it is by safety.

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There's more to it than that. Basically any agency that doesn't already have appropriated funding must shut down.

Certain services continue to operate because they collect money on their own. The Post Office and USPTO, for example, can continue to operate for quite awhile b/c of the fees they charge that are not dependent on Congress.

During the last shutdown my contract was covered by a multi-year appropriation, so I actually worked overtime. I'm not this time around so I'll probably have some time to kick back and start pointless threads.

But safety isn't directly a deciding factor. It's more than Congress knows certain services can't be skipped and appropriated money for them long before the shutdown even became a possibility, let alone a reality.

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It does affect the military. All travel and schools are shut down. Civilian support personnel are sent home.
I’m not sure yet, but I think we don’t get paid until after this is over.

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All correct. Only silver lining is if they pass another CR or actual budget before the next pay date (30 Jan), then the pay issue will be transparent. However, if the shutdown continues through that date, we won't be paid.

However, while the government is shut down most DoD civilian employees are not allowed to come to work. Sounds insignificant until you look at it from my perspective. My division on the AFGSC Staff has 31 assigned billets. Of those, 15 are civilian employees, 2 are unfilled officer billets, and 2 officers are deployed. So during the shutdown we'll be 39% manned. This figure will be way, way worse in places like AFMC where their normal manning is more like 80% civilian versus the roughly 50% I have.