Government Needs To Shut Up And Work

We found out with the partial government shutdown that we have two classes of government service and two classes of employees: “essential” and “non-essential.”

If you run a national park, you aren’t essential. If you work in a government lab, you might be non-essential too. Even a staffer working in the office of a member of Congress can get the non-essential tag. The essential/non-essential sorting doesn’t really make much sense, but then again a government shutdown doesn’t either.

Individual agencies determine whether a function is essential. If you work at an agency funded by fees, like the Patent and Trademark Office, everyone keeps working until the fee income is exhausted. In some offices, one employee is arbitrarily singled out to keep the lights on while the rest are sent home.

Even the ones working may have their paycheck deferred until Congress does its job.

And that’s what this is all about. Congress doing its constitutionally mandated job. As much as the budget debacle got wrapped up in repealing or defunding or delaying the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), which was being implemented even as the shutdown continued, we wouldn’t have been at this point if Congress had done its job over the last several months.

Both the House and the Senate adopted their versions of the federal budget — top-line dollar amounts — back in March.

The House Appropriations Committee approved 10 and four were passed by the full House. But when the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill for the 2014 fiscal year, dubbed “THUD,” landed with a thud on the House floor, the House majority couldn’t round up the votes. House leaders pulled the bill.

The Senate Appropriations Committee approved 11 bills. But when they brought their version of THUD to the floor, they failed as well. Out of a dozen bills required, the Senate adopted precisely zero. Neither the House nor the Senate even attempted to pass a spending bill in all of September.