I realize that people are a little annoyed at this tact, and think it is melodramatic. But consider:<p>* The servers may be hosted on a cloud system, and there is now no way to pay for them. (Even if the bill is due in 4 days, the employees can't do the work 4 days from now, they have to do it now.)<p>* Some of the information may be time sensitive, and the submission of forums may rely on employee feedback. These services may not be easy enough to remove in the time they have available to shut-down.<p>* Even if hosted in house, if the systems break, or are hacked into, then nothing can be done fix them. Better to deploy a hardened static page now than be infected with malware running massive botnets when they get back.<p>* They may have to turn off the utilities to their server farm, so they can't support anything but a simple static page.<p>* They have 4 hours to do all that, fill out some paperwork, and still make a backup, and whatever other responsibilities they have (like internal servers).<p>The USDA in specific also handles dynamic data from across the country, so more than some, they have worries about being hacked and having their data screwed with.
What the USDA is doing is called "Washington Monument Syndrome".<p>It is a political tactic, wherein you deny the public access to the most visible aspects of a government operation during a period of budget cuts. You will notice all government agencies ceasing stuff like twitter accounts, which cost virtually nothing to operate.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome</a>
Actual information on the effects of the shutdown on the USDA, for those interested in that sort of thing: <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/30/usa-fiscal-agriculture-idUSL1N0HQ1W420130930" rel="nofollow">http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/30/usa-fiscal-agricul...</a>
Ironically, you can't straightforwardly get to the USDA contingency plans. The whitehouse.gov link on the page points to an index of all the contingency plans (across the federal government). Unfortunately, the entries for the USDA plans are just links pointing back to usda.gov...<p>I'd imagine you might get somewhere at archive.org (and there may well be other ways to get them from a .gov source), but still...
Is this purely symbolic, or is there some real sense in which replacing the USDA website with a placeholder saves the government a measurable amount of money?
I fully expect Obama and Democrats to use every available tactic to make this as painful as possible for the population.<p>They truly need to have the US wake-up to an apocalyptic scenario. Anything less than that and people are going to see that the emperor has no clothes. If they could have airplanes falling out of the sky, they would. If they truly use such tactics I really hope people take them to task for it. With nearly four million people working for the federal government --a good deal of them solidly in the Democrat camp-- I fully expect them to terrorize us by fucking things up to the extent of their abilities.<p>As for the argument of cloud servers and other services in the private sector causing shutdowns, the question is very simple: Anyone thinking that the US isn't going to pay for these services is a moron. This shutdown will last as long as it does and then everyone will get their checks. Anything to the contrary is pure theater.<p>I just got an email from whitehouse.gov full of FUD. It's a disgrace that whitehouse.gov is being used this way (this isn't the first time). Democrats would raise hell if Republicans were in power and used whitehouse.gov for partisan propaganda. What a shame.<p>Tomorrow is likely to be the US politics version of Kabuki Theater. Could be fun to watch.
It's likely this is more than political. There's a lot of work they'd need to do to disable just the parts of the site that would cease to function without backend staff, or place appropriate disclaimers on out-of-date information, which drives literally billions of dollars in economic activity.<p>Four hours isn't enough time for that.
The healthcare.gov site certainly works. This whole thing is nothing more than two fat guys arguing over the last piece of sausage. It's theater. From my perch in Avignon, France it's actually pretty entertaining. Watching Sheila Jackson Lee's caps-lock shouting 'speech' and wondering if the speaker of the House is going to start crying is good fun.
This is a little confusing. The USDA's website is presumably hosted on some server, so what exactly is preventing it from remaining online?<p>I mean, the domain is clearly still here, and there's a web page serving that error, so...
Does anyone know who designates essential personnel? (5 mins of Google didn't return an answer)<p>Could the President designate all federal employees as "essential," to circumvent the budget requirement? (Yes, this would be a power grab by the Executive branch)
Just got en email from a client who is with the Dept. of Agriculture and he said "it looks like the government is shutting down on Tuesday" and for the life of me I just couldn't understand what that was referring to.
NSA.gov is down.<p><a href="http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/nsa.gov" rel="nofollow">http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/nsa.gov</a>
A pandering PR stunt by an overgrown bureaucracy. (The USDA is the home of the rabbit inspectors, bravely protecting our children from risky pet bunnies.)