The Fiscal Year (2026) Begins With The Shocking (It’s Shocking I tell You) Ecoutez Et Repetez Of The Perennial Washington DC Political Follies
The players may change from time to time, but the game remains the same no matter who gets in office. This faux outrage and gamesmanship has been going on since you know who was a Corporal and will likely never change in our lifetime.
It doesn’t matter who is in charge as long as we are pretty much a near 50-50 electorate split between the two major parties in a system designed to leverage the cooperation and collaboration of both to do the people’s work.
A funny thing happened to collegiality along the way: it was extruded out of both parties in favor of contributors-bagmen-money-people, lobbyists. Gone are the good old days where the democrats were in charge of everything and they still had a show-pony tendency to invoke brinksmanship in September to get their hobby projects funded and fulfill the desires of the lobbyist paying for action-with fealty to the highest donor/bidder: the people’s work-and desires-be damned!
Unlike your household, business or the things that are top priorities in your life that must be done else there are consequences, our government-run by people we send to Washington DC to do our business on our behalf-are immune to deadlines. You would think they would be motivated because of money alone, as their paychecks obviously come from the federal budget.
If you believe the above you are naïve. With all the goatropery shenanigans going on in DC our employees have no fear of foregoing pay because they passed legislation long ago that among the “essential” services that must be funded regardless of the status of the budget, includes things like care and service of our nuclear missile stores, emergency services, hospitals, etc., etc., and congressional payrolls.
That’s right-congress is one of the mission essential priorities that gets paid whether a budget is passed or not. Our employees-who are in this pickle because they failed to do the job that we sent them to Washington to do-arranged it so they get paid whether a budget is passed or not.
Alexander Fraser Tytler perhaps said it best: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
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Of course we are a constitutional republic, although many politicians erroneously label us a democratic republic or democracy. Many of our politicians also disavow that our liberty and rights come from God, believing they stem from government. Which is kind of like having a swim coach who can’t float or swim.
Those who like to look for a silver lining in these matters-which really means political advantage for their side of the swamp-would like to believe this is a Trump problem, or a “those guys issue” or (fill in the blank) an R or D problem where those Nazi, Fascist, rat basswich R or Ds are just terrible people who won’t compromise, humma, humma, ding, dong, blather, blather.
According to USA Today (a source I just about never quote) the following is the list of government closings in the last 50 years.
- 1976: Under President Gerald Ford. Lasted for 11 days.
- 1977: Under President Jimmy Carter. Lasted 12 days.
- 1977: Under Carter. Lasted eight days.
- 1977: Under Carter. Lasted eight days.
- 1978: Under Carter. Lasted 17 days.
- 1979: Under Carter. Lasted 11 days.
- 1981: Under President Ronald Reagan. Lasted two days.
- 1982: Under Reagan. Lasted one day.
- 1982: Under Reagan. Lasted three days.
- 1983: Under Reagan. Lasted three days.
- 1984: Under Reagan. Lasted two days.
- 1984: Under Reagan. Lasted one day.
- 1986: Under Reagan. Lasted one day.
- 1987: Under Reagan. Lasted one day.
- 1990: Under George H.W. Bush. Lasted four days.
- 1995: Under President Bill Clinton. Lasted five days.
- 1996: Under Clinton. Lasted 21 days.
- 2013: Under President Barack Obama. Lasted 17 days.
- 2018: Under President Donald Trump. Lasted three days.
- 2018: Under Trump. Lasted several hours.
- 2019: Under Trump. Lasted 35 days and cost the economy about $3 billion, equal to 0.02% of GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Just a few things to point out here. The most important and humorous to me is that quite a few of these shutdowns happened with democrats holding power in congress, including several times where they were the government, holding congress from 1949 to 1981 with the exception of ~8 years or so. The Carter shutdowns happened with the democrats in absolute control of the government.
Of interest above-also-is only one of these shutdowns apparently cost the government money, in 2019: hahahahaha. And when pigs fly only applies to your policy objectives.
The Carter shutdown in 1977 was the first one that meant anything to me personally. Being an Army Specialist, the legal experts in our unit that we had access to, aka, “poop house lawyers,” advised that if the government shutdown and the Army was therefore not going to be paid, we just wouldn’t show up: we didn’t need to…
Which was absolute donkey dung nonsense, but what I/we didn’t know in 1977 which was later abundantly clear is that with the exception of the government furlough under the machinations of Obama and Pelosi in 2013-Army folks just go to work like normal-although in civilian service anybody who is non-mission essential does not go to work and all of us end up getting paid every cent of their pay.
Every cent! In civil service we were told to just “fudge” the hours to make them come out to 40 and 80 for the two weeks: winky, winky… When I became a civilian servant after military retirement, we had the shutdown under Clinton in 1995. I was scheduled to brief our BG Commanding General as the Chief of Data Collection on one of the biggest tests/experiments ever under the Operational Test and Evaluation Command the week of the shutdown, but I was not mission essential and therefore was not at work.
Ironically enough because of the archaic government rules my lead contractor-whose firm billed on a calendar year vice fiscal year basis-was at work and ended up briefing with no input from me: talking about it would have been work related. Our COL Director and Commanding General both wrote nice letters about the job we had done on the test they were briefed on, with my boss jokingly observing that the contractor was “no Max Dribbler.”
I’ve written about the government shutdown in 2013 elsewhere, where the threat had been a major topic of concern for successive years representing an incredible waste of time, money, energy and government hours as our agency team leaders worked to come up with the magic number of what a satisfactory number of mission and non-mission essential personnel would be.
The topic of a shutdown but particularly the “injustice” of a manufactured furlough–called sequestration-as if the government was going to save money somehow by not paying some civil servants staying home-was well described in Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper’s book “Facts and Fears” (which you can find for a few bucks on the heap of discounted books if interested) but suffice it to say that when the long threatened shutdown came it was a demotivating classic example of the fecklessness of our government.
The very notion that our government-which was in the midst of a policy of printing treasury bills to the tune of 4 trillion dollars between 2009-2014 (an average of 56B a month) or so under Quantitative Easing- -was going to reduce the budget through a furlough of the civilian and/or military workforce was not unlike buying the 36 can soda packs at Costco to save $3 bucks but paying for it with a credit card that charges you 26% or higher for the privilege.
Our government. Our elected officials, our employees. In our agency-the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)-we had some ~4700 or more personnel in the Analysis and Production Directorate at the time with a mission of producing intelligence and mapping, charting and geodesy products (MC&G) from national technical means satellite imagery. Our personnel numbers were based on the amount of intelligence collection and the resulting products necessary to support our customer base.
The easiest way to think about it in my mind is in terms of a slaughterhouse (I know…) Let’s say you have a plant that slaughters 8000 animals a day and it takes about .6 workers per animal to conduct operations-staging, preparation, etc., etc., packaging and shipping. Now if you asked me how many people I would need if we only did say 5000 a day, that would be an easy calculation but still somewhat of a difficult thing to answer since it is artificial and not reflective of demand or capability: it is a pure arbitrary number. Particularly when we know the number will go back up to 8000 in short order.
But that’s not how the government works. The Obama Administration question was how many of these people are mission essential? The question the bosses should have asked was how many animals are we going to slaughter? But instead, our bosses at all levels signed-up to this silly game. The game being the notion that without any less intelligence collection requirements, no relief on any production requirements and no change in any of the dynamics related to the production schedule, calculate how many of the employees are mission essential.
Over the years that this charade went on the number of non-mission essential personnel grew and grew each year until we reached the point where nearly 50% of our analytic workforce was non-mission essential. Satellites were still whirling overhead, images were still being processed 24x7x365, ships sailing at sea and aircraft transiting the skies still needed MC&G updates and changes. No reduction in the number of animals slaughtered occurred, none of our customers agreed to cut down on their demands, no enemies said they would take a break or hiatus while congress got its stuff together.
For the first time in my career spanning nearly four decades at this point (2013,) government personnel were furloughed and lost pay-suffered pay cuts-of 10% per pay period for what amounted to about 10 pay periods (1 day out of a two week pay period of ten days.) We took up a collection among the seniors to make up for the cuts, but what an amazingly crappy thing to do to what the government has always described as our most precious resource: our people.
Particularly in light of the ridiculous signs the Obama Administration deployed that purported to close the national monuments in DC where visiting veterans told any who advised them that things like the Vietnam or WW II Memorial were closed to “pound sand.” Tell me your feckless without saying anything.
How feckless-devious-were they? The Obama Administration disapproved the use of administrative leave for furloughed personnel because “that would still represent a cost to the government.” Obama and Nanny Peloosi were hell-bent on extracting maximum pain and publicity from this shutdown.
In truth it is simply hard to take our government serious anymore over this specious and manufactured yearly crisis of congress’ own making that happens as regularly as the tides, sunset, taxes and German trains.
Pretend to be concerned if you have the energy for it. Orange Man Bad, feckless congress, useless employees, democrat and republican talking points, all under the category of same schtuff, different day, ho-hum, what’s on TV tonight?
Signed non-mission essential employee no 4700…
Max Dribbler
1 October 2025
LSMBTGA: Lamestream media echo chamber (LMEC-L) social media (SM) big tech tyrants (BT,) government (G) and academia (A)
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