Currently hearing the pronouncements about the potential shut down. What a waste. Each time we get up to the brink, there is significant lost time - even if only 15 min per employee.
I really wish there were some sort of requirement that Congresscritters face significant penalties if they fail to timely fund some level of basic services. At the least, require that they all report, and lock the damn doors before they handle this most basic of their damned functions.
Maybe their pay should be docked for any time that the government is shut down as long as it was not because of a veto. Whatever their salary works out to per day. (And not further broken down. If government unfunded for an hour, that’s a day’s pay.)
But, it would take a constitutional amendment to make it binding, so I guess not.
I think it was David Brinkley who said DC is the place where people do things badly that should never be done at all All the essential people stay on the job. .
Just ask anyone in a government job. There are thousands upon thousands of them, and every single one will tell you exactly whose job is essential. Hey, that many people can’t all be wrong! Can they?
Feb 28, 2011 · by Stephen Reader
…Basically, during a shutdown, federal agencies must freeze all non-essential services. How does each organization decide what’s essential? And what does that word even mean to a government that rarely agrees on what’s important?
…
What’s essential
In the event of a shutdown, every government agency is responsible for determining which jobs under their umbrella fit the following criteria for what’s absolutely necessary to keep America running:
Providing for the national security, including the conduct of foreign relations essential to the national security or the safety of life and property.
Benefit payments and the performance of certain contract obligations
Medical care of inpatients and emergency outpatient care
Conducting activities to ensure continued public health and safety, including safe use of food, drugs and hazardous materials
Air traffic control and other transportation safety functions
Border and coastal protection and surveillance
Protection of federal lands, buildings, waterways, equipment and other property owned by the United States
Care of prisoners and other persons in the custody of the United States
Law enforcement and criminal investigations
Emergency and disaster assistance
Activities that ensure production of power and maintenance of the power distribution system
Activities essential to the preservation of the essential elements of the money and banking system of the United States, including borrowing and
tax collection activities of the Treasury
Activities necessary to maintain protection of research property.
Employees who get rated “essential” are still allowed to report to work, whereas everyone else is barred from performing their duties, even if they offer to do so for free. Essential personnel get paid, but only retroactively, once funding for their particular agency has been restored.
Despite these guiding principles, the process an agency goes through to in identifying these functions and the employees who perform them is a highly subjective task.
What’s not
Since 1980, every government agency has been required to have a plan in the case of a shutdown, defining essential employees and operations. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) mandated this in a memo that continues to be updated.
These plans are not available to the public, which is why there is so much speculation in advance of the expected fallout. We simply don’t know what’s considered essential these days.
. . .
And eventually they’ll agree to some cobbled together behemoth that no one has read the entirety of - hell, parts of which haven’t even been written before signing!
What other entity - of any size/nature - could budget in this manner?
Absofuckinglutely disgusting!
Are you kidding me? It’s not Congress’s fault this thing isn’t solved, it’s Donald Trump’s fault and, by extension, the GOP, which has been obstructionist since 2009.
‘Congresscritters.’ OMFG. There aren’t enough in the Universe for that one.
It’s the Republicans. It’s Donald Trump. It isn’t all of Congress.
In what’s become an American tradition, we’re a little over 24 hours out from the federal government shutting down. Just to make things more interesting, this time it’s in the middle of a surging global pandemic. And it’s all because Trump is throwing a tantrum over the size of the individual relief checks in the bill, even though his own Treasury Secretary is the one who negotiated the agreement.
His options right now are terrible: cave and sign the bill without getting the $2,000 checks he’s going on about; veto the bill and get overridden so fast it’ll make his head spin, or do nothing and let the government shut down to accomplish . . . what exactly I’m not sure.
Technically Congress could pass another continuing resolution to keep the government open for a few days, but the Senate in particular isn’t designed to work that fast and there’s no guarantee Trump will sign it.
in the Universe for that one.