That government shutdown, by the way, which stretched from midnight on the night of Friday, January 19, to sometime in the late afternoon of Monday, January 22, was more talked about than real. Some federal agencies took the day off, and here in Washington the traffic on Monday morning was easier to negotiate. There were a few other consequences. “Staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission had to cancel a trip to a beachfront conference in San Diego,” according to the Wall Street Journal. A few agency websites “flashed warnings that information wasn’t up-to-date.” And “a range of everyday government operations, from workplace safety inspections to Internal Revenue Service audits, didn’t take place.”
That’s it? Well—pretty much.
There were no doubt a few other hiccups, but the nation mostly failed to notice that lots of federal workers had a three-day weekend. We would like to suggest that perhaps the federal government should take every Monday off, but then (a) a lot of customers at post offices and various other federal agencies have long since concluded that this was already the case, and (b) far be it from us to suggest that bureaucrats should draw paychecks without reporting for duty. It does prompt this question, though. If it really takes around $4 trillion to keep the federal government running every year—that’s almost $11 billion a day—and the whole thing can stop running for a long weekend almost without anybody noticing, might the great hulking apparatus of federal bureaucracy contain some superfluous items? As a younger colleague of ours asked, why are there nonessential government personnel?
