Captain crunch is bad for you, and so is the government.

Especially the current government. But you'll find out soon enough.

There are 2 categories of federal workers. 'Essential' and 'Non-essential'. Whenever there is a government shutdown due to failure to pass the budget, they inform all of the essential federal workers to report to work without a paycheck, but they will eventually be payed for that time once the budget passes.
They inform all of the non-essential federal workers to stay at home without pay, but they are payed for that time even though they didn't work.
My suggestion is to mow down the non-essential federal workers and leave the essential federal workers alone.

It's not unreasonable to want people who were working from home to come back to the office and work. That's just good business.

Captain Crunch is delicious.

All emails are public record. If they are on the clock and don’t answer they get written up for poor performance based on previous times emails were answered. There are necessary people. There are leeches also. I work in government. I see it all the time.

Some counter comments to some on this thread.

1. Unions. Some agencies have them, and some do not. I don't know what the ratio is over the entire federal government. I think my agency used to for a some workers back when they were physically printing off a certain product, basically a blue collar job. Now those products, and all of our "products" (I sort of hate that word) are digital. No union in my center.

2. "Essential" versus "Non-essential". I don't know who came up with those terms but in our case, "essential" really means "emergency level of staffing". Whether "essential" actually means allowing any "public facing" services going or just keeping say satellites flying and not getting out of orbit and burning up in re-entry is probably in the details somewhere. I'll ask some folks on Monday about a "service" that I suspect most tman people have touched or used over time and who would update that "product" and how much additional it would cost if it was 100% privatized.

3. The USDA FSA was mentioned in a couple of times and I just saw that in South Dakota either a regional office or a major county office was getting their non GSA lease pulled. I did the math that was in the news story and I figured out it was about $30 a sq foot for a year. I don't know where that places in the general price of commercial real estate leasing. However, the way I understand what FSA does is that they work with individual farmers with all the various backstop programs they can enroll in as they operate . Yeah, people might spout the words to just let "freedom" (total free market work) but we'll see how well that actually flies in U.S. agriculture commodity trading and final consumer production that is concentrated into a few dozen massive corporations that control most food items found in the grocery stores or how ag commodities are traded around the world. I suspect without any fed government backstop programs AND the continued control of both ag commodity trade and making ag inputs into finished food, I suspect most typical American farms (sales of $100,000 to several million each year) would be bankrupt over time. Then we might see how well everyone lives off of the land. I suspect there would have to be a massive, massive reduction in population to reach multi-geographic scales of "equilibrium".

Finally, the DoDGE boys and girls (literally) "What 5 Things Did You Do Last Week" e-mail got a bit more timely the second time around, dropping here (Central Time) just before 9pm Friday evening instead at almost 4 pm last Saturday. Pretty easy, I'll cut and paste 4 of my 5 from last week, drop one, and add a new one. My bullets were fairly complex, I wonder if any of the AI bots "scratched their heads" on some of the details? Elon baby should tell us how many totally unique responses they got from last week (uniquely different tasks). I suspect they will get many new bullets (tasks) this week. We'll see...