Five days into the US federal government shutdown, the one striking effect that sticks in my mind is how extraordinarily easy it has been to drive downtown. With the vast majority of federal workers – who, truth be told, are among the worst drivers anywhere – stuck at home with their families (who, truth be told, by now are mostly at wit’s end putting up with them), Washington DC is no longer the nation’s most congested and difficult place in which to drive.
Oh, sure, people complain about the traffic in places like New York, Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, but in those places, at least motorists have a choice of freeways to get stuck on. Here in Washington, there’s only one – US 495, a.k.a. the Capital Beltway. True, US 95 approaches the city, but in fact never got through it – construction of that portion was halted during the wane of the great Interstate Highway Building Frenzy. So, instead, when driving south or north toward DC on US 95, traffic is diverted around the city over the eastern half of the Capital Beltway. US 270, a younger but likewise stunted Interstate, terminates on the west side of the Capital Beltway, intersecting it a couple of miles north of the Potomac River. Oh, sure, there are some other short stretches of road around here that purport to be freeways – US 295, US 395 and the comically named “Whitehurst Freeway,” which is all of half a mile long, but they’re just local jokes, really.
Therefore, under normal circumstances, every weekday morning our single real freeway here in Washington is stuffed to capacity with US government workers commuting to their jobs, and nearly every morning, at least one and usually several of them manage to get into a farcical traffic accident of some kind or another, bringing traffic on our one, single real freeway to grinding halt. Ah, but not for the last four working days – no, since the Shutdown, driving from my home in Great Falls, Virginia to my office in downtown Washington has been an uninterrupted and efficient breeze from portal to portal.
Still, not all federal government workers have been ordered to stay home. Some, known as “excepted” employees, have continued to report to work. “Excepted” is the politically correct term which is used here inside the Beltway in place of the term “essential,” which is used everywhere else in the United States to refer to federal employees who are kept working no matter what and come what may. The ones who have to stay home during snowstorms, floods, hurricanes and Tea Party temper tantrum-induced funding shutdowns, on the other hand, whined and complained like two-year old children themselves, yelling and screaming about being called “non-essential” until the Powers That Be in the federal bureaucracy relented and started calling them “non-excepted federal employees” instead.
Today, the House of Representatives passed a bill which will, after the federal government starts up again, retroactively pay all those “non-excepted federal employees” for the time they spent during the Shutdown of 2013 sitting at home on their butts. The Democrat controlled Senate is expected to pass it and President Obama has declared that when that happens, he will gladly sign it into law. Readers of this Web log outside the Beltway who might feel somewhat insulted, denigrated or enraged at the thought of hundreds of thousands of “non-excepted federal employees” getting paid for what definitely will amount to four days, and what could amount to several weeks of sitting on their butts at home doing nothing, should calm down and realize that in fact, depending on their seniority and benefits, those same federal workers spend between 46 and 48 weeks a year sitting on their butts doing nothing – in highly expensive federal office buildings, which they must commute to and from every workday. Thus clogging up the Capital Beltway morning and night, I might add.
To be absolutely fair, it should be recognized that there is a federal workforce telecommuting program, which recognizes that since most federal workers spend their whole workday sitting on their butts doing nothing in front of computer screens, they might as well sit on their butts at home doing nothing in front of computer screens there instead of at an office at their federal agency downtown, at least for a day or two every week. And to that, I must say, in the immortal words of Albert Camus – gentlemen, hats off! Because just thinking about what the Capital Beltway would be like nearly every weekday morning and afternoon if there were another twenty-five or thirty percent more federal workers driving on it makes me want to vomit.
Still, being an essential, or “excepted” federal worker during a government funding shutdown can be problematic, too, as I found out on Friday after lunch with a client from the Indian Embassy at the Bombay Club. There, lurking at the bar, waiting until I was leaving to go back to work, was Hoag, a GS-15 IT security division director at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“Collins!” Hoag beseeched me the moment I hit the pavement on Connecticut Avenue outside, “we have to talk, okay?”
“Off the record?” I asked.
“Yes, yes, of course,” he confirmed, “definitely off the record.
“But billable?” I sought to confirm.
“Well,” he stammered, “Uh… I… I – well, okay, how about just a few minutes on the clock for now? I have some, ah… discretionary funds available which I can pay you for that with at the moment.”
“Sure,” I agreed, gesturing across I Street toward Farragut Square, “it’s a lovely day, so why not discuss your… issues on a park bench other there?”
“Um… sure,” he mumbled diffidently. “I guess there would be as good a place as any, as long as nobody… you know… overhears us.”
“As opposed to someone seeing you visit my office,” I shot back, “on Tuesday, which is my first available schedule opening, to attend a formal consultation, billed, as usual, for the entire ninety minutes to the Department of Housing and Urban Development?”
“Oh, no, no,” he protested, “that would be sure to show up on an audit… I mean, that wouldn’t be appropriate during a government shutdown. Um… yeah… sure… let’s talk about this… over there.”
“And what,” I inquired as we sat down on a park bench under a clear blue sky in the sparkling autumn sun, “is it?”
“This shutdown,” Hoag moaned, “is [expletive] killing me! It might even ruin my career!”
“Killing you?” I repeated in disbelief. “But you’re excepted!”
“Yeah, I know,” he spat in disgust. “Which means I have to come in every day and be responsible for HUD information security until the government opens up again!”
“And you have a skeleton staff of excepted federal employees working under you, right?” I observed. “And meanwhile, HUD is doing absolutely nothing, as opposed to its usual level of activity, which amounts to doing nearly nothing, so I can’t imagine you’re overworked – I mean, you’re not, are you?”
“You don’t understand,” he huffed, “these… machines… the servers… and the software – the firewalls, the DMZs, the intranets, the extranets, all that [expletive] – they’re still there, and now is the perfect time for hackers to break in and do God knows what!”
“You could shut them down,” I suggested, “or most of them, anyway, in an orderly fashion…”
“You still don’t get it!” Hoag interrupted with an irritated tone. “Yeah, I suppose the servers could be shut down, or maybe we wouldn’t need to shut them down if we knew what to do, I don’t know – but we can’t even figure out which ones those would be, or what order to shut them down in, or if we could do that and then bring them all back up again when the shutdown is over, because… because… because…”
“Because,” I concluded, “when they shut down the government, they sent all of your contractors home!”
“Yes,” he sighed dejectedly, “you nailed it, as usual – Tom Collins, the man with a mind like steel trap. Yeah, they not only sent home my personal contractor – the one who does my job for me – they sent home all the contractors who work for my excepted federal employee staff, too.”
“And you don’t actually know anything about information technology security yourself, then?” I sought to confirm.
“Of course not,” he grumbled. “I’m a GS-15! Why the [expletive] should I have to know [expletive] anything? GS-15s have people for that – they have federal contractors!”
“And,” I prodded, “your excepted federal employee staff don’t known anything about information technology security either?”
“Nah,” he shook his head, “they sit around all day, playing video games or shopping or selling real estate or classic collectible yachts or Pez dispensers or whatever on the Internet – you know, just like federal workers do everywhere, while the contractors take care of the… you know… work and stuff.”
“And you’re concerned,” I speculated, “that if the shutdown lasts long enough, some twelve-year-old kid will break into some HUD databases, download information that might prove… ahem… embarrassing to the agency, or even the Obama administration, post it on his Web site and…”
“Stop, stop!” Hoag begged, clapping his hands to his ears. “I don’t want to hear it! I don’t even want to think about it!”
“Well,” I admonished, “it’s not like I’m the least bit surprised to hear this.”
“Don’t… don’t rub it in, okay?” Hoag muttered ruefully.
“All right,” I relented, “my sympathies, then. But what can I do about it?”
“You could… uh… that is,” he whispered, drawing closer, “if I gave you my word you would be paid later – and handsomely – after the shutdown is lifted, find some… uh… um…”
“Qualified talent,” I interjected, “in the field of information technology security, who would be willing to… help you and your staff out… with a high degree of discretion?”
“Exactly,” he responded with an air of relief, “that’s precisely what I was getting at.”
“My usual hourly rates,” I stipulated, “plus fifteen percent general and administrative fees.”
“[Expletive]! Jesus Christ Almighty,” Hoag swore under his breath. “Oh, all right, okay, sure, what the [expletive] else can I [expletive] do? Full non-disclosure agreements, right?”
“Air-tight,” I assured him.
“Okay,” he shrugged. “I’ll find the money somewhere after the shutdown ends, even if I have to steal it from [expletive] in the [expletive] HUD housing projects, you can be sure of that.”
“I am,” I told him. “I most certainly am.”