Shutdown highlights basic fact: Most of government is "non-essential"

The Department of Education is far from the only federal agency where massive numbers of take-them-or-leave-them employees hang their hats. According to Government Executive magazine’s incomplete tally, 90 percent or more of the staff at the Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Communications Commission, Securities and Exchange Committee, and the Departments of Treasury and Housing and Urban Development are considered “non-essential.” And let’s get real: When the Department of Commerce claims that a relatively tiny 85 percent of its workers are “non-essential,” we know we’re being played. Conversely, anyone who has ever passed through a airport checkpoint in the past decade will find it hard to keep a straight face when the Department of Homeland Security – home to 56,000 Transportation Security Administration workers – says just 14 percent of its crew is non-essential. Overall, 80 percent of federal employees will stay on the clock during the shutdown. It turns out that the feds can’t even do shutdowns very efficiently.

According to the Office of Personnel Management (10 percent “non-essential” workers, by the way), total federal employment across all branches of government peaked in 1968. While current levels are down from that all-time high, it’s also true that the 21st century has seen what USA Today has called “years of explosive growth.” Excluding military personnel and postal employees, the federal workforce swelled by about 300,000 over the last decade and now stands at around 2.7 million. And although Barack Obama has called for more government workers in his various budget plans (none of which passed, even when his party ran both houses of Congress) most of the increase came under George W. Bush, who was ostensibly a conservative Republican.
Which suggests the surfeit of non-essential federal employees is a bipartisan problem requiring a bipartisan plan to print up pink slips as if they were dollar bills. But good luck with that. Sen. Ted Cruz – the very person who engineered the shutdown – is busy now redefining exactly what counts as an essential function of government. “We ought to fund vital priorities,” Cruz told the Salt Lake Tribune on Monday. “We should reopen the national parks today; we should fund the [Department of Veterans Affair] today.”