Surprise! Trump administration totally not prepared to do a shutdown

Trump with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whose State Department will be shutting down.

Federal agencies are frantically scrambling to figure out how to actually shut a quarter of the government down, because when they needed to be getting ready, Individual 1 was going to go along with the plan Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell figured out and that the Senate passed. Oh well.

"At the operational level, our people have not been given instructions for how to wind down,” Jacque Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, told The Washington Post. "Right now, everyone is just acting in a state of uncertainty. […] They were operating on the assumption that Trump was going to sign something." For example, they have to figure out how to notify all the employees who have taken Friday as vacation and will be out Monday and Tuesday for the official holiday, meaning managers are scrambling now to get the word out.

Trump officials haven't yet figured out which offices they are going to keep operating, or for how long they'll be able to keep them going. They probably won't be able to figure all that out until next Wednesday, and with Trump promising "a shutdown that will last for a very long time," it looks like they'll spend their holiday figuring it out.

But you know, as Republicans say, that's what they asked for when they signed up to serve the nation in its government.