Okay, genuine question:
What does a shutdown even mean then?
What is actually shut down? What part of our government and/or government-backed services is/are non-functional?
I'm going to try to keep this short:
Basically almost all contractors are at home with no pay, any essential government employees are at their jobs usually with no pay; almost all of the Employees will be getting back pay.
The government runs a lot of functions through contractors because hiring, but more importantly firing, government employees is huge fucking pain. Basically once you get a government job - and by that I mean a direct employee, not a contractor, it is nearly impossible to be fired.
The reason for this is that if you are fired, there is a huge mass of paperwork. Your supervisor has to explain why they couldn't supervise you into not being fired. Their supervisor has to explain how this happened in their department, and to make sure none of the managers they manage have any employees that could be fired. That supervisor's supervisor has explain to their supervisor what happened. Then what happens is everyone who approved your hiring, everyone who signed off on promoting you, has to go explain how they missed the critical flaws that lead to you being fired.
And while all this is going on, you have the chance to appeal.
No one wants to deal with that horseshit, so worthless wastes of space collect and fester.
The solution to this is government contractors. Want to hire them? Just throw more money at the contractor. Don't like someone? You can fire them. Or even better, avoid all the paperwork and just don't renew their contract in no more than 12 months! The best part is the contractors make an excellent feeder system, so if there is someone actually productive, you can hire them.
This system leads to most of the bitch work being farmed out to contractors. So to my understanding, everything critical is still up and running, but at reduced staff. The reduced staff are being made to do the work the
serfs contractors were doing while their paychecks are being held.
Next week is when everything is supposed to get super fun, when we hit 22 days of shutdown and RIF plans have to start being rolled out.
