Why Government Shutdowns Suck

I’ve now lived through mul­ti­ple gov­ern­ment shut­downs. Each has had a dif­fer­ent effect on me, but this last one, and the ongo­ing Con­tin­u­ing Res­o­lu­tion, has made the largest impact, because I cur­rently man­age almost 90 Sailors, a large inven­tory of equip­ment, and a large travel bud­get with Sailors deployed all over the world. I think there is a big mis­con­cep­tion about a gov­ern­ment shut­down. Peo­ple imag­ine that every­thing just comes to a stand­still, every­one just up and leaves their jobs and sits at home on their hands. Noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth.

For the mil­i­tary, we con­tinue to oper­ate. We con­tinue “oper­a­tionally related” travel and func­tions, although that term is often left to local com­man­ders to fig­ure out. We don’t get paid, but that really comes in to play only if the shut­down hap­pens over the 1^st or 15^th of a month. Oth­er­wise, every­one is show­ing up to work and doing exactly what they did the day before.

So why exactly is a short shut­down a prob­lem? Glad you asked!

Travel gets cur­tailed. Non-​mission essen­tial travel is halted, and every­one comes home. That sounds odd, like, why in the heck would we have “non-​mission essen­tial” any­thing, espe­cially travel? I think peo­ple envi­sion these big con­fer­ences where Admi­rals and Cap­tains are just liv­ing it up in Hawaii at some nice resort. Maybe that hap­pens (I seri­ously doubt it), but for the aver­age Sailor, non-​mission essen­tial travel includes schools, PCS orders, pro­mo­tion boards, rat­ing reviews, and lots of other things. This travel is mak­ing our future bet­ter, but because it doesn’t involve killing bad guys directly, it gets tabled. In this last shut­down, I had to cut my travel short and drive home. The travel I missed will even­tu­ally get resched­uled, but at a less opti­mal date, and will pos­si­bly hurt other parts of my job.

It dis­tracts com­man­ders from their real job. My job is to exe­cute my mis­sion. I know my bud­get and I try to opti­mize it for the year, mak­ing the best use of the tax payer’s money, tak­ing advan­tage of oppor­tu­ni­ties while also bud­get­ing for con­tin­gen­cies. Although I keep tabs on money, I pre­fer it not be my biggest con­cern dur­ing the day. In a Con­tin­u­ing Res­o­lu­tion, and espe­cially in a shut­down, this changes. I have to explic­itly bud­get for every sin­gle trip. If I get any last minute requests, I spend an inor­di­nate amount of time con­tact­ing our comp­trol­ler and get­ting money moved. I feel like a slave to the phone and email, and no mat­ter how pro­fes­sional or good our finan­cial peo­ple are, there are always problems.

It gives finan­cial peo­ple too much power. I’m lucky and have good bud­get peo­ple. In the past, that hasn’t been true. I’ve had comp­trol­lers that are bor­der­line dys­func­tional. In a Con­tin­u­ing Res­o­lu­tion, these peo­ple, and not com­man­ders, have all the power. If they decide that there isn’t bud­get money for travel or sup­plies, you fight an uphill bat­tle. Sure, you can report them to the IG. Heck, I’ve done that and writ­ten to my Con­gress­woman in the past. But guess what? Even when it works, it is painfully slow. And remem­ber: mil­i­tary per­son­nel are in a place for 2 – 4 years, but civil­ians last (seem­ingly) forever.

It pits ser­vice mem­bers against Con­gress. Every time a bud­get isn’t passed, ser­vice mem­bers gripe about Con­gress. “I wish Con­gress would do its damn job” is a con­stant refrain I hear. And while I keep a tamp down on it, and tell peo­ple to let it moti­vate them to vote, it still sucks. It really makes ser­vice mem­bers wary of Con­gress, and the lack of respect that exists between the two groups con­tin­ues to decline. It also doesn’t help that we have less vet­er­ans in Con­gress.

So yeah, shut­downs suck. But they don’t suck because we sud­denly can’t pay for ammu­ni­tion. Instead, they suck because they dis­tract us from what our real job is: pro­tect­ing this great nation.

This post rep­re­sents the views of the author and not those of the Depart­ment of Defense, Depart­ment of the Navy, or any other gov­ern­ment agency.

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