Essential Workers

John Stossel questions the number of 'essential' Federal personnel:

The handwringing continues over who is an “essential” government worker.

This was on Twitter yesterday: @Gary__Austin Gary Austin: I work at a VA Medical Center, I was told, that office people were non-essential. Nurses, Dr's, Janitors, & etc had to work.

I understand why government workers are anxious, but wonder why the rest of us should be.


If government shuts down, Americans will notice because the media will do lots of stories on disappointed museum visitors and traveler who can’t get a passport. But without the media hype, I doubt that most people would notice, because so much of what today’s government does doesn’t need doing.



For example, will you really miss the Government Printing Office’s comic books? You paid $5 to have the government publish “Squeaks”, a comic book that is supposed to get kids interested in printing. I doubt that they sell many, but even if they do, you lose money on each one. They sell them for $5, but government manages to spend more than $10 on each comic book


During the last government shutdown in 1995, most government jobs were deemed “essential.” There were 2.92 million federal employees then--excluding the military.

A mere 800,000 government employees were deemed “nonessential."
∙ 99 percent at Housing and Urban Development
∙ 89 percent at the Department of Education
∙ 75 percent at the Labor Department
∙ 72 percent at the Department of the Interior
∙ 67 percent at the Commerce Department
∙ 59 percent at the Small Business Administration

Why do those jobs even exist? We certainly don’t need to spend $90 billion per year for an Education Department. Education is a local responsibility. Shipping money from states to Washington so Washington can scarf some money off the top and then ship the money back to states hasn’t helped educate kids. Test scores remain dismal. Republicans once talked about eliminating the entire department. But now even Paul Ryan’s proposal doesn’t do that. Once government acquires fat, that fat is very hard to cut.

The rest here.