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?

Comments

Re:"Financial Sense"

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of these actions are clearly not "required". Park facilities that don't normally have round-the-clock security are now being patrolled and guarded by park rangers who have been told to keep everyone out. The logic doesn't make sense because these are facilities that don't have any services being discontinued that would necessitate a total closure of the lands and monuments during a government shutdown. It is purely punitive action designed to make regular people suffer in the hopes they whine to their congressman about the budget negotiations.

Sure

[protactin]

I imagine it costs less to defend against and clean up after DDoS or XSS attacks on a static page, than it does against an active web site.

Missing the point

[TrumpetPower!]

It's very, very expensive to move out of your home and then back in again, even to the same home. But if you don't -- for whatever reason -- have the money to pay the rent, that may well be your only choice.

If you're expecting to have the money but your boss's accounting department is simply incompetent, you might be able to plead with your landlord. Or maybe not.

But whether staying at home or moving out is cheaper is irrelevant to the question when the rent check comes due.

That money is being wasted isn't the fault of the agencies that are shutting down. It's the fault of the Republicans who're holding the entire country hostage in a blatantly un-Constitutional attempt to repeal majority-supported legislation. They've tried dozens of times to repeal the legislation through the normal legislative process and failed miserably each time; now, they're determined to wreck the national economy (with the shutdown) and possibly even the global economy (with the default) if the majority doesn't give in to their demands. They've shot multiple prisoners already (don't forget the ongoing sequester!) and are now threatening to blow up the whole building.

In a modern democracy, their actions would long ago have resulted in the dissolution of the government and a new round of elections. And the Obama administration's support for the NSA wiretapping would also have triggered elections. Such a shame we live in a place that's rested so much on its laurels and is now so far behind the times.

Cheers,

b&

Re:"Financial Sense"

[wstrucke]

That, and the fact that it is *public land*. The people do not report to the government, the government reports to the people. If it's not being funded there should be no authority to "close" publicly owned resources.

Well duh.

[hey!]

They've furloughed IRS employees. Does *that* make financial sense? They've shut down FDA food inspection. Does *that* make financial sense, if we count the cost to the nation of food borne illness? This shutdown is about many things, but "financial sense" is not one of them.

We live in a country full of idiots who say things like "Keep the government out of my Medicare," without realizing that Medicare *is* a government program. Many more understand that things like the military or NIH cancer research are part of the gummint, but only on an intellectual level. On a visceral level they only associate the government with things they don't like, such as pollution regulation. The stuff they *do* like apparently just happens, as far as they're concerned.

So put yourself in the shoes of the zookeeper who has to take care of the pandas as the National Zoo. Pandas don't stop eating or shitting because Speaker of the House doesn't have the balls to bring a clean continuing resolution bill to the floor. So you've still got to show up to feed them and muck out their enclosure, only now you're not being paid. Your landlord still wants paying; the grocery store still wants paying, the daycare center you leave your kids at so you can go to this job still wants paying, but *you* don't get paid.

Wouldn't *you* pull the plug on the panda-cam? If you *don't*, people *will* say, "look, we shut the government down but things are still working." Yes they *are* that stupid. So you pull the plug so they'll understand that things like the pandas being cared for just don't "happen" on their own. Sure, people get pissed off, but they're not paying for the panda cam so they can lump it. Not seeing Mei Xiang and her cub isn't going to kill anyone. They weren't paying for panda cam anyway; that was paid for with a grant from corporate sponsorship, so if anyone has a beef with this, it'd be Ford Motor Company.

Re:Well duh.

[hey!]

Really? Do you honestly believe there will be some disease outbreak because a government bureaucrat wasn't present to check a box on a form that only the allowable level of rat feces was present?

As a matter of fact, I do. It's not like outbreaks of foodborne illnesses are rare. Major outbreaks happen in the US every year or two, and smaller outbreaks are contained all the time before they get big. If there's an E. coli outbreak in lettuce or listeria in hamburger, who do you think tracks it down to the source and tells all the supermarkets which food to take off the shelves? The food safety fairies?

You can be complacent about food borne illness because government bureaucrats (and scientists, engineers and information technologists) keep contamination in American food to manageable levels. Worldwide, the third most common cause of death is diarrhoeal diseases, most of which are food or water borne,

I've never worked with the FDA, but I've worked with the CDC as a contractor. I happened to be at the Fort Collins DVBID one time when they were scrambling a team to investigate an outbreak of some mysterious hemorrhagic fever in Africa. People were fleeing the area but the CDC's team was going in. Why do they do that kind of thing? So whatever it was that had people bleeding out of their eyeballs never finds its way over here. People just *assume* that things like Yellow Fever, Dengue or Malaria just don't happen here in the US. They never stop to consider that this is not a natural state of affairs. We used to have that stuff all the time. You just don't see all the hard work that goes into making Yellow Fever something most Americans have never heard of. I have -- the zoologists, epidemiologists,physicians and veterinarians who provide this "non-essential service."

I've had this very same argument with a guy who was blase about losing one of our meteorological satellites. "Hurricanes don't kill many people," he said. I wanted to grab the blockhead by the collar and shake him. What would have happened if people only had two days notice with Sandy? Or with Katrina or Hurricane Andrew? Complacent idiot.