what does it hurt if the government is shut down for a few days? They always have the Essential people report for work, and the non-essential people stay home. This happens several time a year during winter snow storms in the DC area.
Hi. I work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Through an accident of history, I am not a federal employee, but an employee of a shell corporation which is owned by the University of California. I, and everyone else here, am a federal contractor, and am not subject to backpay during a shutdown. But all of our funding is federal, and we shut down when the government does.
Pretty much the only "essential" government employees around here are the security details that guard the plutonium. 99% of us, and the same is true for almost every government agency that I know of, are "non-essential". Non-essential doesn't mean expendable or optional in this context, it just means that the nation won't immediately collapse into anarchy in our absence. It's really only a tiny few that are "essential". Meanwhile, massive 100 million dollar computer systems don't exactly turn off like a light switch or like to be neglected, expensive and time consuming experiments are interrupted and may need to be started over again from scratch, everyone is furloughed, morale goes into the toilet, and recruitment of good talent becomes more difficult.
So when you say, "what does it hurt if the government shuts down for a few days", what you are really saying is, "Who cares if we furlough clong83a without pay for no good reason right before Christmas. Who cares that he has a wife that will be 8 and a half months pregnant at that time? Who cares if morale at LANL, NASA, and everywhere else goes down the toilet and America can no longer find good scientists willing to work for such a capricious employer?"
Please think carefully before you post any response.