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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?
Since when does the majority of the actions of the US Government make "financial sense"? This is about what is required, not what is saving money. I've heard from various news sources that the shutdown, itself, *costs* millions per day. By that logic, "financial sense" would have been to not shutdown in the first place.
but either way shutting the gov't sites is a great way to remind people that gov't does things they want done. For the last 20 or 30 years we've been hammered with a 'Gov't is Evil' message. Never mind that it was the Federal Gov't that did away with Child Labor, Slavery and Segregation, created Superfund sites for cleanup of the messes made by private business and made them stop poisoning ground water.
With all the small gov't Tea Party blather out there it's nice for Americans to be reminded that gov't is a tool, and one they depend on. I for one don't want to see EPA regulation, anti-slavery and usury laws, OSHA Safety and FDA regulations go away.
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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.
Does anyone really believe the facilities they shut down are due to lack of funds?
All the actually expensive stuff is "essential", and they keep paying for it. Instead, they pay people to barricade off open-air monuments, and to add modify websites to become non-functional; they pay rangers to stop people from "recreating" in national parks. It's fairly obvious that the shutdown is just Washington Monument Syndrome writ large.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
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.
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BMO
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
I'm a scientist and there's a conference going on right now at my institute. Researchers have already paid for everything in advance (weeks/months ago): meeting fees, food, accommodation. The total comes to around $2k. However, researchers from the NIH institute have been told that they can't attend because of the shutdown. Clearly this isn't about cost savings. One researcher was apparently planning on visiting relatives in the area after the meeting and asked if they could just go and do that instead (on their own dime) and they were told "no" and that it would be "bad if we found out that you went". So there you go. Makes little or no sense to me. Frankly, I find cordoning off memorials in DC to be similarly silly.
soylentnews.org
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.
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It's petty, it's vengeance, and I've had enough... how about you?
I've certainly had enough. Enough of a certain party holding a gun to the head of the country to try and defund something they voted for then decided they didn't like, even after they already changed it completely from what it originally was.
And before you try to say I'm some crazy liberal, no. I voted for Bush in 2004 and McCain in 2008 (Johnson in 2012). But I've come to the conclusion that the leadership of the Republican party in it's current form no longer cares about the good of the country. All they care about is brinkmanship and sticking it to Obama and Democrats. In all honesty I say recall every single Congressman (any party), bar them AND their staffers from ever serving in Congress again, and start over from scratch. The whole system needs a reboot.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
You don't seem yo understand how hard this is.
The reason we have a months-long budgeting process is that Congress is basically two Committees with more then 500 members, and they aren't run under Robert's Rules of Order. They are run under two different sets of rules, which are completely unique. When one of the Houses decides to delay things there isn't a lot you can do.
The issue in this case is that the Speaker is dictator of what the House of Representatives gets to vote on. He can only be over-ridden by a) firing him, or b) get a lar ge proportion of the House to sign a Discharge Petition. But discharge petitions on bills you just wrote on Monday, because you were convinced that nobody would shut the government down, CAN'T be considered until 30 days after Monday. Discharge petitions on older bills are possible, but when the Democrats tried one the 20 or so Republicans who claimed they'd support a "clean bill" decreed that this discharge petition didn't count as a clean bill.
The problem seems to be the GOP members are convinced that if they don't support the Speaker in every way that matters the Tea Party will murder them in the next primary. Since ethics rules exist, Obama can't just say "Dude, if you vote for this bill Apple board member Al Gore will totally take care of you."
Moreover most of them actually believe that shutting the government down is the Right Thing to do because a) they actually believe ObamaCare is Evil, and b) they actually think that they'll convince enough Democrats to support a delay of ObamaCare to delay ObamaCare. To them trading a few months of government services for a delay of ObamaCare is just common sense.. OTOH the Democrats are equally adamant that ObamaCare is a Great Thing Which Will Save America, that delaying it is Evil, and that getting no government for three months in exchange for not delaying ObamaCare for a year is a great idea. And if anybody was willing to give on either of these points he wouldn't have made it through a Primary.
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.
this stupid stunt that politicians pulling by shutting down the federal government is foolish at best.
when can we hold elections to replace those that have caused this shutdown?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
You are writing as if they didn't have a whole goddamn year to do this.
And you are writing as if the Republican Party hasn't chased after the "energy" of the Teabaggers for years, thinking they can control the derp. The "dog that finally caught the car" that was referenced yesterday by Rep. John Dingell is /not/ about the shutdown despite what he thinks and what the media is reporting. The "dog that finally caught the car" and is in terror are the "mainstream" Republicans like Boehner (you know, the Speaker) of the Republican Party who are now terrified of being primaried out by morons like Rand Paul and "Ted" Cruz in 2014. Because they're not obstructionist enough.
You should read the cheerleading comments by the barely literate on Ted Cruz's Facebook page. Fucking scary, actually.
We need to seriously reconsider how we handle electing these clowns.
When you leave primary elections up to the people with too much time on their hands and not enough intelligence that vote for populist morons that pander to them, you get what you pay for. Clown shoes everywhere.
On a related note, the "clean CR" is based on the budget numbers that the Republicans themselves set, based on Paul Ryan's stuff. This "The Democrats Won't Negotiate" talking point is complete nonsense and anyone who pays attention for 5 minutes knows it. The Republicans are getting what they want with the budget with this CR, and that's what's hilarious about it. The Republicans could have claimed victory with the budget with this CR but they can't because they have to somehow save face with this shutdown that they let themselves get talked into over the ACA. Because the Mike Lees and Ted Cruzes (teabaggers to the core) of the House wanted to create as much pain as possible and hope that the public is dumb enough to blame anyone but them for this boneheaded "plan" they cooked up between themselves in their own little echo chamber and convinced their buddies that "this will work, this time, for sure."
That's not even getting into the debt-ceiling nonsense with the teabaggers. To hear a teabagger like Rand Paul talk, it's all "kitchen-table-economics" and a default is "no big deal." As if the US Government budget is like a household budget instead of the budget of a publicly-held large corporation. Imagine if Microsoft started defaulting on its debt. Look at what happened to Bear-Stearns when they defaulted. Yeah.
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BMO
What people haven't noticed is the total votes and how Boehner's behavior wouldn't make sense in a functioning political party.
Here are, roughly, the totals:
A) About 30-40 Republicans want a shutdown for some undefined reason.
B) About 150 Republicans do not want a shutdown, but will take whatever position Boehner takes, and will not be rebels.
C ) About 20 Republicans assert they will be rebels to stop the shutdown.
Now, look carefully at that. Remember the 'Hastert Rule', which was a way to enforce party discipline? Where bills only got to the floor the majority of Republicans liked them? Notice anything wrong here?
The vast majority, groups B and C, of Republicans want to fund the government. They would have voted for a CR at any point if Boehner had put it forward. (In fact, we'd probably had a little fight over the House wanting to continue the sequester and thus some Democrats would vote against it, but that's in an alternate universe where this isn't going on.) I mean, now there might be problems getting it to pass, now that some B-group Republicans have stuck their necks out trying to follow the party-line, but all Boehner had to do was put it up for a vote three weeks ago, tada, it passes, and we continue onward.
And it's not like Boehner was in group A. He's a perfectly reasonable person. There was no reason, in a functioning political party, for him not to put that bill forward. So why didn't it happen?
Because the Republican party is completely and utterly broken.
I don't mean broken in the sense of a 'pushing policies no one likes', although that is possibly true. It is broken because, thanks to gerrymandering, a large portion of this country has competing _Republican_ races, and that's it.
And that gerrymandering seemed liked a clever plan back when it was set up, but this is what we get. A party in a civil war, and Boehner picked the side with the biggest guns. (Although the least amount of people.)
Now, admittedly, there's not actually a way out of this. Republicans have to gerrymander like that. Without that, they wouldn't even control the House! So they're not going to stop that.
Basically, folks, this is how a political party fails. How it unravels.
In fact, there have been signs of that for a while. The Hastert Rule is something only a weak party would need to start with. The Republicans going full-bore anti-ACA instead of saying 'Hey, you finally agreed to _our_ health care plan.' All the incredibly weird bullshit getting spewed by the right.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?