The guy who would be nominally responsible for the government to continue to operate should a shutdown happen—Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney—is basically in the job part-time. He's spending his time on his other job, dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So it's not much of a surprise that government agencies are completely in the dark about what happens at 12:01 Saturday morning if a deal isn't reached.
"I think the most frustrating aspect of this all is the total lack of communication from anyone in management," said a U.S. Department of Agriculture employee. […]
Of the dozens of federal employees HuffPost spoke with, many said that as of Friday morning, they had received no guidance from the leadership of their departments. Others had, but only very recently.
Mid-morning Friday, employees at the departments of Homeland Security, Interior, Commerce and State, among others, said they’d received notices telling them agency leaders were “working to update our contingency plans for executing an orderly shutdown of activities that would be affected by a lapse in appropriations.”
In other words, just 12 hours ahead of a potential shutdown, some federal agencies were still figuring out what they were going to do.
Every agency is supposed to have a plan, submitted to OMB and approved by it, for how to deal with a shutdown—which employees are essential and which should be furloughed, etc. But 66 out of nearly 130 agencies haven't submitted those contingency plans.
"I just cannot imagine working at an agency without an updated contingency plan, without the days and weeks we spent working through the worst case scenarios of funding and staffing," said Melanie Newman, who worked at the Department of House and Urban Development and OMB under Obama. "It can only result in chaos."
In the middle of a very bad flu season, no less. "According to the most recent plans, 14,536 of the 18,530 employees at the National Institutes of Health would be furloughed while 8,440 of the 12,974 staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would experience the same fate." That's just one example of the potential disasters to come. But that's not something that this administration has bothered to think about.
That's because they've got an incompetent, unprepared, ignorant, irresponsible, uncaring oaf at the top whose response to a potential shutdown has been to "joke" that "it would be a 'shame' if a government shutdown were to occur on, or overshadow, the first anniversary of his inauguration as president." He's got that $100,000 per couple anniversary party to get to, don't you know.
Make no mistake, if this shutdown happens—and thus far there's no indication it won't—it and the chaos and damage that results because of criminal incompetence will be on the heads of Republicans.