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Are Shuttered Gov't Sites Actually Saving Money?
Lots of U.S. government agencies' websites are partly or fully shut down, many of them with messages like this one, from the front page of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory: "Effective 7 p.m. EDT, Friday, 4 October 2013, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) temporarily suspended all US operations because of the US Federal government shutdown. All NRAO facilities and buildings are closed; NRAO personnel, other than a skeleton crew, are on furlough and cannot respond to emails or phone calls." Brian Doherty argues at Reason that many of these shutterings don't actually seem to make any financial sense, and that the sites are down more as a public statement than out of fiscal prudence. If you're involved with running an organizational web site (government-funded or not), do you agree?
The shutdown makes little fiscal sense, especially when you consider that those employees furloughed will most likely receive back pay.
It costs even less if you simply turn the server off.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The issue is not what costs more or less money. The government has money. What the government doesn't have is the authorization from congress to spend it. It doesn't matter that the normal funds for running the park cost less than the park rangers. The rangers are authorized and running the park is not. The way our system works is that no money can be spent without a formal authorization from congress and right now we don't have that. They passed a law a while back to continue funding "essential" services during this time but we don't get to pick and choose based on what makes financial sense.
This is the downside of having a government of laws not men. Without the law we can't do anything even if common sense says it should be so. Want common sense, Congress needs to pass a law.
speaking as a hosting engineer, the sites youre seeing are in 'static maintenance' meaning the original content is replaced with a banner. since each site has a banner page for a shutdown, for example usda.gov, its feasible to presume the shutdown sites were created ahead of time and are all hosted on one or two machines at government facilities that have not been shut down.
static maintenance pages arent saving cash in the form of hosting costs or electricity but they do mean your normal 'staff' of engineers and content creators for the sites can be sent home safely. you dont need to worry about content expiring, which if your the USDA or the FCC thats a good thing because you dont end up misleading people inadvertantly about advisories or notices because no one was around to remove expired content.
now, once the crisis ends and everyone goes back to work, im certain lifting the 'shutdown' banners and playing catchup with a few weeks of missed content and data is going to cost money. congressional staff are likely to begin filing their helpdesk tickets in a 'zerg rush' fashion, so anticipate their cost centers to accrue more charges than usual ( as a government IT worker, you often assign every minute of time to a department.) any unforseen outages or problems caused by say, two weeks of database updates or transactions, might be problematic and require more engineering time than had we not shut down the government. also for the static maintenance team (those guys in charge of the banner only) you'll need to start sending them backpay for their ongoing work and overtime for their miserable on-call rotations.
TL;DR: shutting down the government does not save money in the long term or short term in any appreciable amount.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Honestly, how hard would it be for the Dems to recruit a handful of Republicans over to their side for a funding bill?
They already tried.
The 22 or so Republicans that said they'd vote for a "clean CR" to their constituents and the press in their home states .... didn't. They wouldn't sign the Discharge Petition, which would bypass the Speaker, to bring it to the floor.
So there you go.
--
BMO
Though if we're going to be precise, it's not just "the Republicans" but factionalism and the Speaker's inability to command respect from members of his own party. (This isn't a particularly partisan statement - or at least, observers from both the left and right have reached the same conclusion.)
Longer answers as to why:
1. As someone else mentioned, a simple static page is a lot less vulnerable to attack or disruption than a functional page.
2. Bandwidth costs are lower, since all you have are people hitting the site, seeing the shuttering, and going away again, rather than actually using it.
3. Anything behind the front page, such as databases, can and probably are shut down completely, saving on power and bandwidth.
4. Information provided on sites that aren't updated is likely to be inaccurate, which is worse than no information at all.
5. The cost to shutting them down can't have been all that high, since here's the process: (1) Have a developer make a static "We're not open for business" page, (2) have your admins configure front-end webservers with a mod_rewrite (or equivalent) to direct all traffic to that page, (3) shut down anything that's not a front-end webserver. Yes, it wasn't free, but my guess is whoever is coming up with the costs is factoring in paying the tech staff they already had on salary to do the work.
Basically, what I'm seeing is people who advocated shutting down the entire federal government as a complete waste of money are now going "Wait, I didn't mean that, or that, or that other thing." It's sort of like the reaction if you are told to remove everything from a messy room and start throwing absolutely everything out.
I am officially gone from
Furloughed employees will not receive back pay. They are ordered not to work and can't legally do so. Employees deemed essential must work, but they won't be paid until Congress authorizes the funds.
Mount Vernon, which is actually owned by a private foundation. The Feds are part-owners of the *parking* *lot*.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
AZ state offered to "reopen" the Grand Canyon.
The Feds have refused. (What did the Feds do to close the GC? Fill it in?!)
Several boat launches in the Bozeman MT area, a huge trout fishing area.
The federal agency had specifically ordered park officials in Wisconsin to close doors on Kettle Moraine, Devil’s Lake and Interstate parks, as well as sections of Horicon Marsh — sections that were owned by the state, no less — but Wisconsin authorities shunned the demand.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Yes, we are no longer citizens, but subjects who may or may not go on our land at the whim of the those who rule by our consent.
At least, that is the way it is supposed to work. Our land, our public servants, not the other way round.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
No. It is you who are misinformed.
Every federal government shutdown has resulted in funding, and back pay, for all the federal workers who were temporarily sent home, and the evidence regarding the outcome concerning the current shutdown suggests this time is no exception.
"Support all around on back pay for furloughed federal workers"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/10/04/support-all-around-on-back-pay-for-furloughed-feds/
The federal workers will eventually be paid for the time spent not working.
The taxpayers however, get no such reprieve from taxes. No matter how long the federal government remains in disfunctional shutdown mode, taxpayers are still liable for paying taxes, to fund services, they currently are being denied.
Exactly! Without the Federal Government, we wouldn't have a national highway system, NASA and space technology (GPS satellites...), the Internet, nuclear power/energy (and weapons...), etc. not to mention some protection against corporations externalizing all their pollution somewhere else, and considering the occasional mass poisoning a business/PR expense.
Republicans were already posing on day one of the shutdown, at War Memorials in DC, feigning shock that a shutdown actually shut stuff down.
Byrd died like 3 years ago. He fought tooth and nail to prevent the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from passing, which would have passed in the 1930's if it wasn't for people like him and the rest of the DNC at the time. Byrd was held up like a hero until he died and just yesterday Harry Reid made a speech talking about how much better it was when Byrd was in the Senate.
No, its not 148 years ago, it was yesterday.
And this is why Obamacare is getting a bad rap. Too many people spewing things they don't know anything about, either maliciously or ignorantly.
Not only has this been discussed in DC already, but it passed the house already 407-0.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/05/government-shutdown-back-pay_n_4049377.html
Watch this.
Of the 70 or so Dixicrats, 3 ended up in the GOP and the remaining 67 went back to the DNC. See I can say smack too, but the difference between me and you is I can cite a fact to back me up.
Any infrastructure requires maintainace. Maybe not daily, but certainly periodic. Anyone who runs a website knows that they can't be left on autopilot for a month. Given that this shutdown is open ended, it simply makes more sense to turn things off that do not have funding rather than come back in later, when people are not being paid, and do a controlled shutdown.
There is also the issue of security. It would be a great idea to leave all the infrastructure open when all these disgruntled employes who were laid off with almost no notice have nothing better to do than play hacker. So many private firms have had so much success allowing access to their computers to laid off employees.
As far as national parks go, there may not be fully staffed, but there is a probably a park ranger to help with issues Most people do expect services. It is better to close the park than to have to recall some laid off employee in an emergency. Which is what is happening now in louisinan/alabama/missisipi/florida. You would think these sates who are so supportive of the shutdown would support themselves.
That said, there would be ways to turn on more services. Congress could pass the bill that guarantees federal employess back pay. It is there and it only requires the House to agree. The congress could also vote to open all public facing agencies with a skeleton staff. This would amount to giving some a paid vacation while others would have to work, but there we go. We could open websites and state parks and the memorials.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Government owned lands are not public in the sense you suggest. They are a public "trust," which means the government holds the lands in trust for the benefit of the public (theoretically). This is to distinguish us from England, where the lands are owned by the crown, and has no legal incentive to provide any benefit from the lands to the public.
Just like other trust funds, the trustee controls and decides what produces the highest benefit, and is largely free to do just about anything, even screw it up, so long us the trust is managed in good faith.
I make no statement on the usefulness or fairness of this legal construction, I am merely pointing out how it works.
The "Cliff House" restaurant in San Francisco is a privately owned and operated restaurant which is built on Federal land. It has no Federal employees. They _PAY RENT_ to the Feds.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/10/03/sf-shutdown-theater/
When hasn't this happened you asked. The Lincoln Memorial the Washington Monument, etc. have NEVER been closed like this. This stunt is an Obama original. The democrats defunded Reagan three times. He didn't spend money closing parks. Clinton took a small step in this direction by furloughing park service employees, resulting in parks that had federal staff being closed. He didn't spend extra money closing open air landmarks.
While the worst that's ever happened.before was that federal employees were sent home, Obama has spent more money posting federal agents to block access to private businesses that happen to have a federal contract. No president before has come anywhere near this ludicrous stunt.
BS. Complete and utter twaddle.
Slavery was codified by the States before there was a Federal government. Virginia, in particular, took a leading role in creating the rules that allowed slavery. Under English law there were no slaves, just Serfs, and Serfdom was a) incredibly rare, and b) a lot nicer then slavery. Under slavery you could get home from a hard days work and discover your toddler was on a boat to New Orleans to cover Mas'r's gambling debts. Under serfdom both you and your toddler were tied to a specific Estate, which meant neither could be forcibly moved out of town.
Segregation was never codified under any Federal statute. The Military was segregated, which meant lots of military regulations were racist, but Segregation as a policy was created by the states and enforced by the states.
I agree that our system is broken, but not necessarily for the reasons you state.
The President does not 'oversee' Congress -- Congress, the Executive, and the Judicial are separate, independent branches of our government. This ensures, among other things, that even if Congress is deadlocked (as it is now), we can't have a situation where there is no government -- like happened in certain European countries recently where they couldn't form a government for months. Of course, that's not to say that guarantees we have a functional government (outside of military)...
The real problem with Congress, particularly in the House, is the two-party system and archaic rules that allow a minority of representatives to block any action even when the other party has sufficient votes to pass a measure.
A primary reason for the two-party system is because of the (gerrymandered) way that all of our representatives are elected from fixed all-or-nothing districts. If multiple seats were elected at once in overlapping districts, with a ranked voting system as seen in parliamentary governments, third parties would have a viable chance of getting elected and disrupting the duopoly.
IANAL, nor a politician, but IMHO the furloughs are not about saving money.
They are a result of the federal government not having authorization to spend any money.
It's like a company in bankruptcy proceedings, the curator takes over and protects the assets while working to get the best outcome for the creditors.
"these are facilities that don't have any services being discontinued"
If that were true, nobody would be unhappy with their closure, and those places wouldn't be a very safe place to be even before the government shutdown (no maintained roads and trails, no and safety equipment, no animal control/fire/law enforcement/first aid service, etc).
What it's about is both preventing damage to assets and preventing spending of any money not deemed absolutely essential, which they have been instructed to do from the top down.
If a website needs a security update for a zero-day exploit, or gets hacked or vandalized during the furlough, the IT guys are not allowed to do anything about it because they are on furlough. They are not deemed essential employees and therefore they can not do work, any work, including volunteering to support the website (nothing they can do about that, in fact they can get in trouble for breaking those rules). We should be lucky that there is a webpage with a notice: They could have simply powered the machines (cloud, whatnot) off. What if the air conditioning turns off and the server room overheats, or there is some kind of water leak in the room, damaging the running server(s)? If I was responsible for an Internet-exposed website, and I was instructed to protect the assets with only absolutely essential expenditures, and I would be guaranteed not to be able to do anything for it for an indefinite amount of time and there was nobody willing and able to take on the responsibility during my absence, I would shut it down too, to prevent being faulted for anything happening to it in my absence.
If inside a national park an accident or crime happens that needs for example a road closure, a rescue, a fire department t respond, or an arrest (for example, for damaging public property, public intoxication, etc), then the government can't help and can't control the damage because there is no authorization to spend any money to pay for the work and materials of the rescue, fire control, etc. So the best way to prevent damage in the park is to completely close access to it.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Right. That is why they blocked off the side of the road so you can't stop to look at Mt. Rushmore.
Pure partisanship:
https://twitter.com/diana_west_/status/386543998992519168/photo/1
And I doubt AZ ever had the option to keep the Grand Canyon, it was declared a national forest preserve and a game preserve a decade before Arizona was even a state.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
The latter, posting armed guards to keep people away, is clearly better.
Here is what a NPS Ranger has to say:
Over the course of any given week, every National Park I am aware of could easily become a high risk situation from any number of natural events. A very simple example is a camper going into anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, or another with a snake bite, and no staff on duty with the walkie-talkie that would alert base who in turn would call in the resources to keep the person alive.
It is understandable that the USA National Parks would not want to be hit with negligence lawsuits were this to happen. And it would definitely happen: most visitors to national parks are not prepared to handle emergencies on their own. And there are an awful lot of park visitors-- the probability that someone would get into serious trouble approaches 1.000.
While there is a cost to shutting down the National Parks, keeping them open without the personnel that keep the park experience safe would be the crime of creating an attractive nuisance. The Park Service has a legal duty to not only shut down when staff is furloughed, but to patrol to keep persons out.
Will