You hit on a good point recently made by Thomas Sowell on the subject of shutting down services deemed to be non-essential:
Imagine a department that is tasked with exactly two objectives. One is to build statues to Benedict Arnold around the country. The other is to provide free school lunches to kids in poverty. Now suppose the department is ordered to trim 5% from its budget. From which half does it make the cut? Answer: 100% of the cuts will come from the free lunches. Cutting from that program will create a hue and cry to restore full funding, while a cut from the statue half will only lead people to wonder why we were paying for all the statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.
Let’s apply that to the current situation. If they actually stopped the work of truly non-essential projects, people will very quickly wonder why we’re funding non-essential services.
Just took my mom to the commissary, OPEN for business, only thing
affected is someone not available to update their website! This entire
government shutdown is a HUGE joke!! I think everyone is going to find
out just how many unessential government workers they are actually
paying for!!!!