Quote:
Originally Posted by richlevy
You mean that a minority of one chamber wants to blackmail the rest by holding the entire country hostage...
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I know a handful of federal government workers, and was just talking to one guy this weekend. Whenever there's a threatened government shutdown, it's difficult for them to do their jobs. This one guy works for a financial watchdog branch of the government, and was planning a work trip in October to go do some inspection of records at some place. He's spent the last two weeks preparing for the trip, putting the entire itinerary together and got about a dozen people to change their schedules around to be there for this inspection. (I don't know the details of what he was inspecting.) But he got a call from the OMB to cancel his plans. So that's two weeks of his planning work out the window, and various cancellation fees, and disruption caused in the lives of these other people who changed their plans to meet with him. And this place he was going to inspect is not going to be inspected now. People complain that the government wasn't keeping a close enough eye on the financial industry and that's what got us in this recession, and now they are going to shut down the federal government and do no inspections at all?
On top of that, on a personal level, he's a regular guy who is going to have the uncertainty of whether he's getting paid or not. I realize everyone else has uncertainty about their jobs, but it still sucks when that uncertainty is caused by idiots who are supposed to be running the place but are just playing a game of brinksmanship.