The government shutdown will cost the country billions in lost output and taxpayer funds, but perhaps we can get one thing out of it, because it certainly won’t be a wall: a lesson.
The government is too big and too bad of an employer. Whereas private employment is beholden to market forces, giving workers the power to negotiate salaries and demand more from employers, federal workers are reliant on the stagnant bureaucracy. The law prevents federal employees from striking, as they work not for those in charge of paying them, Congress, but for taxpayers. While the public are the stakeholders in federal employment, the government itself is an unreliable employer, replacing common consumer sense and the entrepreneurial instinct with an astoundingly inept bureaucracy.
We will always need federal employees to collect taxes, issue public services, and defend the nation. But the government employs too many people — to the detriment not just of taxpayers, but of the workers themselves.
Just take the Transportation Security Administration as an example. The shutdown has lengthened airport security lines across the country, thanks to absenteeism among TSA workers — more than double now than it was at this point last year. It’s a good moment to ask: Why do we even have this many TSA workers?
Everyone hates the TSA and with good reason. They grope and harass fliers day in and day out, and for what? The Department of Homeland Security found that undercover investigators could smuggle explosives or weapons through checkpoints 95 percent of the time, as recently as 2015. If they’re not actually saving lives, what are we paying them for?
During the shutdown, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau has ceased to approve new beer labels or warehouse approvals in a striking blow to the craft beer industry. Booze connoisseurs everywhere must ask: Why do companies that have already been approved to manufacture alcohol even require further government approval to begin brewing in a different facility or even to slap a new label on a bottle of already authorized brews?
The Department of Agriculture temporarily shut down the Farm Service Agency, which issues bailouts to farmers badly hurt by President Trump’s trade war. In addition, the Commerce Department has stopped processing exemption requests from manufacturers seeking piecemeal reprieve from Trump’s tariffs. But why should the federal government impose tariffs, a tax on American consumers, with no strategic goal and little legal authority?
Both political parties have inflated the size and scope of government overreach, and both will be required to come to some sort of agreement to end this shutdown. As it stands, it seems improbable that anything meaningful will come from it. But perhaps the public can take away a lesson and hold our corrupt rulers, the bad bosses of millions of public employees, to account.
