It would be really nice if folks would get a grasp of the "essential/non-essential" concept before spouting off. Whether or not one is essential is based on specific situations/crises and not on a day-to-day basis. There are times when active duty military are separated into essential/non-essential due to the mission at hand and the constraints of what is going on.
90 % of the nonmilitary federal employees are utterly nonessential to maintain a Constitutional system. We do not need park rangers because it is not essential that the government own and land outside of DC. Military bases can and should be leased from the States or from private property owners. Federal welfare has no Constitutional basis and neither does federal regulation of medicine or insurance or 99% of what the federal government stifles/regulates. And the ETC. is huge. If you are a Tory rather than an American style conservative then you are concerned to “conserve” the status quo for which all those government workers are essential except the ones who could be eliminated if WF&A were “cleaned up.” which could only be done by appointing a Commission to clean it up with many thousands of new federal workers to do the studies which would recommend that many more thousands be hired to do the actual cleaning up &c et al v/v.