US gov shutdown leaves IT projects hanging, security defenders a skeleton crew
theregister.com66 points by rntn 7 hours ago
66 points by rntn 7 hours ago
I suppose a shutdown is an effective way to avoid being forced to release documents relating to potential links to pedophile businessmen.
This doesn't make any sense. If they didn't release it with the federal government running they certainly don't need to shut the federal government down to avoid releasing it.
If the Republicans are forced to go through with the new process of admitting the new senator, then the Democrats will have enough votes force to force the release.
But congress stays open even if there's a shutdown?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdowns_in_the_Un...
I'm all in favor for releasing them, but do people really think this document will change much? Distraction, projection, and denial are so effective it's not clear what impact people would imagine it has.
If you frequent conservative forums you'll notice people are more committed to the fascist project than they are to Trump. He may in the end be disposable to them.
> I'm all in favor for releasing them, but do people really think this document will change much?
The government seems to fear that it would.
With this in mind, I have to assume that they were killing children on Epstein's island.
"The government" is tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. I have a hard time imagining this list being released would change much about how it operates, frankly. This strikes me as resistance borne of individual—if deep—fear.
Trump is being used as the scapegoat mechanism. They’re using him to push and shove the bad stuff so that when he’s expelled everyone feels like it’s over but nothing really has been reverted. Thiel is definitely part of this. As is his bought and paid for minion Vance.
He seems to be the glue that's holding together the current coalition. The fascist project set is absolutely there, but they've never really won over the MAGA crowd who flocked to Trump's rallies. It's certainly possible that someone will manage to hold them together post-Trump, but nobody in conservative leadership right now seems to have his charisma and ability to draw those people in. (I absolutely believe that Vance thinks he can do it, but I am extremely skeptical.)
Which does make it challenging for them, since Trump's an elderly man who doesn't look to be in particularly good health.
It's hard for me to imagine anyone who didn't already rise to prominence in the mass media environment of yesteryear to engage voters in the way Trump has.
In other words, I think Trump was able to succeed politically because he was "the guy from TV".
I don't think the current media environment is making more "guys from TV" (at least not with anywhere close to the status they had ~25 years ago).
The amount of effort Trump has made to hide these documents makes me think they must be so much worse than expected.
At least one Republican Senator has made the plan to stop attacking pedophiles explicit:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TulTH6psCsw
I mean, yeah he probably flubbed his words, but let's also be honest in that most likely what happened was he was going to performantly proclaim "Let's stop protecting the pedophiles" realized mid-thought that that would effectively equate to saying "Release the Epstein files" putting him at odds with Dear Leader and at that point rafael_ed_cruz_brain.exe crashed and dumped core containing the shocking statement he ended up saying.
I don't know what else would make sense given that he didn't immediately correct himself, which is what one would expect if it were just a traditional brain fart.
>At least one Republican Senator has made the plan to stop attacking pedophiles explicit:
>I mean, yeah he probably flubbed his words, but let's also be honest in that most likely what happened was [...]
So not explicit? The whole point of something being "explicit" is that the point can be conveyed through straightforward reading of what was said, not vague implications through "dogwhistling" or "what he must have meant was...".
He didn't correct himself and no one else bothered to correct him in the whole room. It's pretty explicit at this point.
Why are we still giving the benefit of the doubt at this stage?
>He didn't correct himself and no one else bothered to correct him in the whole room. It's pretty explicit at this point.
No, it's pretty obvious that it's a flub, given that he's clearly reading from a script and has a prepared billboard behind him that says "sex abuse -40%". If flubbing a line and not correcting it counts as "explicit", then what do we call it if someone straight up says that he supports pedophiles? Super-duper explicit? "He flubbed a line and didn't correct it" falls right in the same alley as "dogwhistling" accusations, which also often accompanied with insistence that "he knew what he was trying to say" and "if he wasn't dogwhistling he would have worded it differently".
>Why are we still giving the benefit of the doubt at this stage?
I'm not giving the benefit of the doubt, I'm just pointing out that it's not "explicit".
>explicit
If we're doing semantics:
">(of a person) stating something in a clear and detailed way.
It is indeed" explicit ".
>No, it's pretty obvious that it's a flub
"binders full of women" was a flub. It was still a PR disaster. We've now moved beyond "grab them by the pussy" and we can't muster any rage now?
The charts don't really mean much given how much the admins have already contradicted this and talk about how crime is rampant in [insert city to be invaded].
>then what do we call it if someone straight up says that he supports pedophiles?
Explicit. Still meets the definition. I don't think we need to argue about spectrum of explicit. We can bring "literal" back or "with genuine intent" if we want.
I haven’t been following this mess but if the republicans have the majority in every house, why are they not agent preventing it? And why are they blaming the democrats for it?
The Senate rules require a 60+ vote majority to pass the funding bill. There aren't enough Republican senators to hit that, so they need a few Democratic votes. Yet they're unwilling to negotiate and work out a measure that Dem congresspeople can live with; it's their way or the high way.
Technically it’s 60 votes for cloture, to end debate and allow the vote. The vote is still by majority, and Senators can vote for cloture but against the bill.
Because a 60 majority is needed. They have the majority but not 60 so they have to compromise somewhere to get the necessary votes.
The bill needs 60 votes. GOP has 53-47 majority. They need 7 dems to vote.
So far 3 dems have voted for the GOP bill. Fetterman of PA, one of the NV senators, and Angus King of Maine.
Can we even call Fetterman a dem at this point?
Yes. Ask again in 2028 though I have a feeling his affiliation is subject to change.
GOP apparently had enough votes to pass a budget by reconciliation. Which means the riders they want to add on, dropping Obamacare funding expansions are at minimum important enough to shut down over.
They do not seem to be acting in good faith, not sending people to negotiate any of this. Combined with the leaking presidents comments about being able to force through things under shutdown they wouldn't be able to otherwise, I think a reasonable interpretation is this shutdown is intentional and part of someone's plan.
edit: since subtext is dead its called Project 2025 and it's supposed to be a "bloodless coup" of the federal government. And if that isn't obvious by now please wake up.
Also the current OMB director along with the President have apparently decided they can just carry out rescissions of any spending they don’t like, even though the spending is congressionally mandated. Republicans in the house don’t care to address the fact they’ve ceded the Purse to the White House so why would Democrats negotiate a spending bill when the president can decide he’s not going to follow-through on D priorities after the bill is approved?
The Heritage Foundation was founded in mid 70s. This has been their long game since.
Republicans haven’t acted in good faith since Newt Gingrich.
That's giving Ronald Reagan a lot of credit.
edit: Forgot about Watergate for a second there.
True! But I think in general, those were the exception, not the rule. Gingrich changed the party as a whole to grab power more than anything else, including respecting democracy or honesty.
Because the US system requires 60 votes in the senate to pass most bills, not 50. This is the root cause of a huge amount of the dysfunction in the country.
Is it? Requiring consensus to pass laws at the federal level, that are binding on the states, doesn't look like a terrible thing to me.
The root cause is first-past-the-post winner-takes-all representation, inevitably leading to a dysfunctional two-party system.
Requiring a two-thirds majority for crucial bills is quite doable with proportional representation. It just means having to make slight compromises to end up with something most people will be happy about.
Isn’t the root cause that we elect babies who can’t negotiate?
You could argue that the root cause is that people who feel that babies best represent them are given the privilege of voting.
You can't pass a budget without a super majority in the Senate (60/100).
Nearly every Republican has voted on a continuing resolution which would just kick the can 30/60/90? days.
>You can't pass a budget without a super majority in the Senate
Yes you can. It is called reconciliation and it was made for passing a budget with a simple majority. Problem is when republicans used it earlier this summer they didn't actually fund the government fully so now they need 60 votes.
>Problem is when republicans used it earlier this summer they didn't actually fund the government fully so now they need 60 votes.
How did the OBBBA get passed under reconciliation then? I thought the whole point was that bills could only pass via reconciliation if it didn't change spending/revenues?
There were arcane rules. For example to pass the Shuttle-to-Houson bullshit (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45424822) they couldn't put money for a specific policy (move Discovery) but only set aside money for Texas to house a nonspecific vehicle, one that had flown to space. Etc.
See e.g. https://rollcall.com/2025/06/23/houston-we-still-have-a-prob...
Many of the other comments in the thread illustrate that you shouldn't trust proclamations on the internet, AI or otherwise. You don't ipso facto need 60 votes to pass every bill through the Senate. The reconciliation bill over the summer thus passed with solely Republican support.
It's the opposite. Reconciliation lets you pass bills that only change spending/revenues, and isn't allowed to change policies which are revenue-neutral.
You might be thinking of how it's not allowed to create a deficit after 10 years, but that's traditionally done by just saying "everything here expires after 10 years" and then leaning on a later congress to extend it.
(It's a little more complicated, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_States_... covers it.)
That still doesn't explain how the OBBBA passed but they can't use the same process to pass a debt limit increase. Do republicans want to add more stuff to the bill? Based on the wikipedia article it looks like it should be able to pass a bill that only raises the debt limit through reconciliation?
They could have raised the debt limit through reconciliation, but this shutdown isn't about the debt limit. This is literally the bill saying what the budget for the next year is, without which the government isn't allowed to spend any money (as opposed to not having any money to spend when it's the debt limit).
I think the reason they can't use reconciliation for this is that the budget has to include discretionary spending, and reconciliation is only allowed to be used for mandatory spending.
I said it in another comment and it's in many reports, but per Senate rules they need a 3/5th majority (60 votes) to pass the funding bill. One Republican voted against, two Democrats and one Independent for. That brought it to 55-45. The Republicans absolutely could change the rules, and don't require that same supermajority to do so, so this is squarely on them.
The same thing happened in 2018 when the previous shutdown happened, also with Trump in the White House and a Republican majority in both houses. The Senate Republicans lacked a supermajority and did not change the rules, and the government shutdown for 35 days.
> The Republicans absolutely could change the rules, and don't require that same supermajority to do so, so this is squarely on them.
Remember, changing the rules means all future rulers can play by those rules. The extensions of these types of powers is exactly the type of thing that leads to Turnkey Tyranny.
I agree. But my point is in that last clause:
> this is squarely on them [the Republicans]
They have the opportunity right now to end the shutdown without requiring any Democratic or independent votes.
They could have offered a compromise budget. They only needed five more Democratic or independent (one available, the other already voted yea) votes.
They did not choose either of those options, instead presenting an option that they knew the Democrats would vote against. That was their choice, they could ignore the Democrats and pass it anyways, or they could work with the Democrats and both can get what they don't want.
> They have the opportunity right now to end the shutdown
They can also do extensions, provisional budgets, they can better carve out ensuring more workers actually get paid?
And yes, they knew the Dems would vote against and they had months to reach that compromise. The same is true in the other direction too. The problem relates to a dysfunctional government where we've created such division lines that compromise cannot be reached. Playing into the belief that it is either side (on this specific issue) just furthers that problem. Watch the rhetoric: Republicans blame Democrats, Democrats blame Republicans.
Funding the government is not a partisan issue. What to fund is, but you can't always get what you want and that's a feature, not a bug.
> Playing into the belief that it is either side (on this specific issue) just furthers that problem. Watch the rhetoric: Republicans blame Democrats, Democrats blame Republicans.
Playing into your game of "They're both at fault!" removes the fact that one has consistently reneged on their promises to the other party and acts in bad faith consistently. Or like Trump refusing to release money that COngress had already appropriated. Centrism isn't enlightened, but foolish.
> Playing into your game
There's a time and place for partisan politics but funding the government is not one of those.
> Centrism isn't enlightened, but foolish.
There's a whole country of people with varying needs and issues. You can't put everything under one clean umbrella. So why don't you start listening to what people are saying instead of responding to what you heard?
>You may have noticed I stressed this particular issue and Funding the government
Okay. But we don't live in a vacuum. It's no shocker that the party lines can't compromise. That didn't come out of nowhere yesterday, at the beginning of 2025, nor even at the beginning of 2016. You create a culture of tribal lines and it seeps into every aspect of your political navigation.
The last straws of all the refusals to allocate congress funds, breaking court orders, and tanking the economy in trade wars definitely means some that Dems are playing hardball too.
>And how has this philosophy worked out?
It passed the big beautiful bill and kicked the can down the road 6 months when we almost shut down in March but "compromised". The ball isn't just in the GOP's court, they own the entire stadium. So, not too well.
> The point of a 3/5th majority is to enforce compromising.
It's worth noting that the 3/5 requirement for most legislation is a recent development. Before around 2008 it was quite uncommon to require a filibuster-proof majority to pass legislation.
There's a count of the times this has come up on the senate's website: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/cloture/clotureCounts.htm
> There's a count of the times this has come up on the senate's website
[0] https://www.senate.gov/legislative/ResumesofCongressionalAct...
There's a fair bit of variance in the number of bills per congress, but not really in a way that correlates to the usage of the filibuster.
> That thing that is essential to a democracy.
The US is the only democracy in the world that has this feature or anything like it.
Switzerland has a feature like it, in that a supermajority is required to pass a non-balanced budget. In practice, their budgets are all balanced. See their "debt brake".
The US will never have a balanced budget with the two current political parties trading off.
It'd require, now, raising taxes beyond what even the most high-tax friendly Democrat would want, or substantially cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense spending. The Democrats will never reduce the first three enough, and Republicans will never reduce the first two and Defense enough.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Everything below those four is basically a rounding error, you could cut bits and pieces but nowhere near enough to balance the budget. And you can't cut interest payments without defaulting on the debt itself, which would create so many more problems. We need to raise our revenue by something like 50% or lower our spending by about 33%, or something in between on both.
We didn't unbalance the budget in a year. It won't take a year to fix it.
If we had proper plans to move in the right direction I wouldn't mind that at all. Instead we're blowing it up further.
Personally I'm fine with proper aggressively progressive taxes and that alone would be a huge help. But we do need to cut defense spending and yes, Social security. Because at this rate Millenials aren't getting Social Security anyway.
I always wonder if there are people sitting around in China thinking "how about NOW?" with regards to Taiwan. "No, give the drunken wife beater more time to wreck the military"
The U. S. had already shut down, we are just now getting around to admitting it.
I don't see a good off-ramp for the current shutdown, so I think this is going to be a very turbulent couple of weeks (months?) ahead. Republicans have the majority and can't even whip together enough votes for a funding resolution, and Democrats don't want to negotiate because all the Republicans have been doing is threatening them and asking for things that are obvious no-gos. And the moment the shutdown triggered, they've started targeting blue states to tear away more funding arbitrarily so that just ensures people rightfully dig in further.
Guess we'll see how long they keep the hand on an increasingly hot stove.
> Republicans have the majority and can't even whip together enough votes for a funding resolution
Republicans would have to change the Senate rules which currently require 60 votes, they only have 53 seats. If they changed the rules, it would have passed without the Democrats who voted yes to it yesterday.
Yesterday's vote was 55-45, with 60 needed. Two Democrats and one independent voted for it, with one Republican voting against. Without those three, it was still 52-48. A change to a simple majority vote would have averted the shutdown.
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
> Republicans would have to change the Senate rules which currently require 60 votes
That's not quite correct. Senate rules are set by simple majority, but the the proposed rule change itself can be filibustered mid-term, except for when someone can exploit procedural rules of cloture to squash it.
Those rules were exploited in 2013 to remove the judicial filibuster and again in 2019 for the Supreme Court. It's called the "nuclear option" for a reason, but the road is already paved.
You've written this twice now and I tried to reply the first time, but you deleted it. That statement is ambiguous, but my "require 60 votes" was meant for the funding bill, as evidenced by my other comments which mention only needing a simple majority to change the rules.
My apologies for the deletion, I didn't like the way I phrased it the first time because what I wrote was too ambiguous and didn't cover the nuances of mid-term rule changes.
That said, I don't see how "would have to change the Senate rules which currently require 60 votes" is ambiguous. The "which" is clearly referring to "change the Senate rules". You just misspoke and I can't be expected to read entirely out of tree replies that you make six minutes before my second comment (which was well after my first deleted comment).
They can always involve the nuclear option and kill the filibuster easily. As they have done before in other circumstances. They won't, because they believe the optics of the shutdown is in their favor.
> Democrats don't want to negotiate because all the Republicans have been doing is threatening them and asking for things that are obvious no-gos.
Also probably because Republicans never negotiate in good faith. What is there to negotiate with when you're being called "the enemy from within"?
Right, we're now in reality where the Senate is passing rescissions with a simple majority in addition to the President now doing "pocket rescissions". How do you negotiate in good faith about budget details if anything negotiated can be undone on a whim?
The elephant in the room is the arbitrary impoundments and rescissions that have occurred under this administration. You can’t negotiate with someone who has just ignored previous appropriations bills.
Republicans don't need to negotiate with Democrats. They have a majority and could end the shutdown all on their own if they wanted to.
HN: Where JavaScript programmers try and fail to express intelligent thoughts not related to JavaScript programming.
Honestly, I would normally not bat an eye at the decision to flag this snarky, but I'm astonished how many blatantly wrong comments there are. Maybe it's just Gell-mann amnesia at work...
It wasn't flagged. decremental is shadowbanned, look at their comment history it's all [dead], not [flagged][dead]. If you don't see [flagged] before a [dead] comment or submission, then it was done either actively by a moderator (rare) or as part of automatic moderation.
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What could possibly go wrong? /s
I didn't have "One of the larger global nuclear powers elects the dumbest man alive as president" as a Great Filter in my paper back in college, but it increasingly feels like a distinct possibility.
The U.S. will never recover from this. Why? Because when foreign nations decide whether to do a deal with the U.S. they will do it with only a maxmimum of 4 year timeframes in mind. Because any deal you do with a sane administration could quite possibly be ended by the American people electing someone who is batshit insane, and who is backed by a bunch of cronies, sycophants and morons.
Six years is a better bet, due to some legislature terms and the fact that a president will be in office for eight years unless they do something really stupid.
But considering the counterparties can be countries like South Korea, Italy, the Philippines, Argentina, and Brazil, it's not like disruption isn't already baked in.
>? the fact that a president will be in office for eight years unless they do something really stupid.
The last two terms (and this one assuming the law is actually followed) will all be 4 years.
Going back to the beginning, only 34% of the terms have been 8 years or more.
Imho going back before Reagan isn't really relevant. In the modern era we have Reagan (8), Bush I (4 because he raised taxes), Clinton (8), Bush II (8), Obama (8), Trump (4 because he botched covid), Biden (4). Biden would probably have been re-elected were it not for the cognitive decline, so he didn't exactly do anything wrong enough to be a single-term president.
Don’t forget Trump-47 will be another four.
So of the last eight Presidents, 4 were one term. That’s still 50%
It isn't like foreign nations are immune to this either. Look at places like Hungary.
Hungary isn't trying desperately to hold onto "single most powerful country in the world" status. The US being as relevant as Hungary is one of the most extreme scenarios of "The end of Pax Americana".
Well, stands to reason that more significant nations can lose the hat at any time.
Well, when it happens to the level that it has under Trump, that country is in big trouble also. But noone (and I mean noone) has damaged a democratic nation as badly as Trump. There are a lot of contenders, but they all miss the mark by quite a bit.
Shutdowns make DOGE redundant. Excellent work!
Historically (it might have even been codified in law after the last shutdown?), furloughed and non-furloughed workers receive back pay after the shutdown ends. It's really the worst of both worlds
Guaranteed backpay was codified in 2019. It makes the shutdown pointless. We're paying everyone regardless of whether they work through the shutdown or not, but not getting the benefit of their work.
Except many people's livelihoods rely on being paid on time, which is not happening in this case.
USAA and other banks offer 0% loans up to the salary, which helps.
But yes, a lack of pay is incredibly disruptive for the furloughed individuals and those like law enforcement officers (who Republicans claim to support...) who are required to work without pay for the duration.
The solution of "Just take out a loan to cover for governmental incompetence" is about as American can you can get.
But yes, USAA has been nothing but great for me overall. Very fortunate I have it.
What about if the administration lays off staff during the shutdown instead of furloughing them? I would think that would not require any compensation.
They've been threatening RIFs, those require 60 days notice so the earliest RIF separation would be 1 November or so if they notified people today. And then you get a severance when you're RIF'd based on years of service (1 week/year for first 10, 2 weeks/year above that, with a multiplier if you're over age 40). Max of 52 weeks severance.
So they'd still be paid for the time up until they are actually separated under a RIF, and potentially more for any severance they are due under a RIF. Severance only counts whole years, 10 months doesn't get you 10/12ths of a weeks pay, it gets you $0.
EDIT: BTW, this is one reason DRP was such a mixed deal. The most admin leave someone got under the first DRP was about 5 months, around 21-23 weeks. If you had 15 years of service or more, the DRP was worse than waiting for a RIF. You were getting at least 20 weeks of severance + 60 days for the notice period. If you had 10 years of service, it was a wash. RIF notice + 10 weeks severance was about as good as DRP offered. And that's comparing to the best possible DRP admin leave period. DRP also bars you from UEI in most (every?) state since it's technically a voluntary resignation. Any delays in being put on admin leave (which was never actually guaranteed under DRP) made it an even worse deal than just waiting for a RIF.
The only people it made sense for were those intending to leave with a job lined up, seniors who were going to retire soon anyways (so DRP became "terminal leave"), and those with less than 10 years of service. The vast majority were better off waiting for a RIF.
DOGE and shutdowns also, in the end, cost tax payers more money because of what needs to be fixed after the destruction is over and we need to rebuild obviously important governmental services. To be a conservative in 2025 (or the last 40 years since Reagan blew up deficits via tax cuts) is to be fiscally irresponsible while hypocritically decrying their own mess. https://www.npr.org/2025/10/01/nx-s1-5558298/doge-fiscal-yea...
It's actually FAR more expensive to shut down because of the backlog, and backpay.
Any "critical" positions are also still working, often through other funding mechanisms.