Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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
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/
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.