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.