Government shutdown: TLS certificates not renewed, many websites are down
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
> This article is overly hyperbolic. Some obscure subdomains of government websites are serving expired x509 certificates. They're not down and this definitely doesn't compromise the encryption that protects any login credentials. Anyway, it is embarassing to see certificate renewal is not automated - it's something any good sysadmin would have set up.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/aeps41/governme...
Like: https://www.data.gov
"Due to a lapse in government funding all Data.gov websites will be unavailable until further notice."
Which is pretty odd, because putting up these blocker pages probably costs more than just letting the sites run unattended.
Security maintenance, keeping databases up, monitoring the various systems, risk of DDoS, answering to users' inquires, bandwidth... - it requires real money to keep any production site live.
Given that these folks are basically working without pay, I don't blame them for wanting to put a cover page saying "Sorry, we're down", and call it a day.
The census site seems to be a decent middle ground. Banner at the top says "NOTICE: Due to a lapse in federal funding portions of this website are not being updated." Still functional, but if something's not updated, you know why.
That is precisely what it does. Serving an invalid certificate and requiring user click-through allows for a man in the middle attacker to inject their own certificate without further error and will therefore be able to intercept login credentials.
From the original article[1]: "One such example is https://ows2.usdoj.gov, a U.S. Department of Justice website which uses a certificate that expired in the week leading up the shutdown. The certificate has been signed by a trusted certificate authority, GoDaddy, but it has not been renewed since it expired on 17 December 2018."
It was probably already renewed, there's just no sysadmin to import the fresh cert. =]
[1] - https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2019/01/10/gov-security-f...
It's also pretty irresponsible to let certs get this close to expiration. Why weren't they renewed 60 days ago?
I handed this for one of the major beverage brands recently it was flagged when GA showed a massive decline - luckily it was one of the smaller noncore brands.
By contrast, for most projects, I have standard cert/le automatically updating every 2-3 months. LE was just becoming a thing a couple years ago, and they'd never heard of it. I'm not saying they should all use LE, but the initial time investment of providing an automated process to renew and update via API would pay dividends in the long run (but the people that feel that the most don't have the clout/power to lobby for such things, usually).
Not surprising to me to see this is the case for local and federal govt too.
I mean, apart from the loss of services, including websites, it seems like many federal workers aren't being paid. Will they be paid back after the shutdown impasse is resolved or is the money they didn't/couldn't earn lost to them. This seems unfair and, in the meantime, how are they supposed to go about their lives?
Overall it seems potentially damaging and disruptive for any organisation or individuals with dependencies on the government.
The reason I ask is I've been turning over what it might look like if a similar situation occurred in the UK, where it'a difficult to envisage a scenario that doesn't end with rioting in the streets.
The shutdown is a cumulative thing. For instance, the FDA food inspections aren't happening. For a week, it's not likely to make a big difference. But a month? Three months? Eventually people will get sick and it'll be a huge issue. TSA agents have mostly been coming to work at airports, but Friday was payday, and they didn't get paid. More and more will call out sick. Same with housing benefits, farming loans... right now they all have a direct impact on a few individuals. But once the numbers start growing the government will be forced to act.
This is now the longest shutdown the US has had, so we're in uncharted territory. It'll undoubtedly have a bigger effect than previous shutdowns. Trump has even said the shutdown could last months, but of course you'd be an idiot to take him at his word.
Wait, why? I was considering this as a possibility before he said anything about it. It totally seems to me like this could go on for multiple months.
If that happens, I will likely be forced to quit my current job as well and find a higher paying job to help compensate while she looks for new work. I'm currently paid under market rate, but I love my job, so I'd prefer to stay where I'm at instead of look for other work to make up for our loss of income.
If this shutdown continues, I think people severely underestimate the negative impact it's going to have on this country. There's going to be a lot of pain and transitions that will have to happen.
If he really wants this wall funded, he should go through the normal channels. It's difficult to see how this isn't anything but a temper tantrum.
With that being said, Democrats don't want the wall. They were pretty much elected to stop the wall and have a huge majority in the House. I don't see how this gets resolved at all.
To have the shutdown end, the House (Democrats), Senate (Republicans), and President have to agree on a singular solution. In the past, the general agreement has been "Lets keep the budget numbers the same and argue about this later".
But the typical plan has failed, Trump is doubling down on the wall (+$5.7 Billion added to the budget), and his base loves it.
The House and Senate can override the president with a super majority. They don't technically need the president's approval.
However getting a super majority in the senate to override a veto will be difficult as most Republicans see loyalty to Trump as important for re-election.
Senate is the place where bills die. You've got not only the Republican-controlled majority, but Democrats can filibuster anything they disagree with in the Senate.
So to pass the Senate normally, you need to have Republicans agree, Democrats "Not Protest".
A Supermajority Senate override of a veto is 67 votes (out of 100). Frankly, I don't see that ever happening in the current political climate.
So, we do have a spending plan available that does have widespread approval among both parties in the Senate, enough to override a veto if the Senators who support it would also support overriding a veto.
Republicans don't want to fracture the party and embarrass themselves with such a vote. McConnell will never let the bill come back to the floor.
Politics in the US has devolved into a strictly two-party system where it’s more important for the other side to fail than be able to hold their success up, where it has ceased to be about what’s best for our civilization and more about grabbing and holding on to as much power as possible, our rights be damned. I don’t hold the Republicans or Democrats any higher in this.
Trump + Republicans have veto'd the CR, meaning they want the shutdown to put more pressure for the Wall.
...and in retrospect that turned out to be ineffective and probably not worth the money. I'm happy if the people still around who voted for it learned from that and instead support more effective border security methods instead of simply repeating old mistakes on a larger scale.
The Democrats offered +$1.3 Billion to boarder security. Its literally passed the House already. Proof is in the pudding, Democrats ALREADY passed such a bill weeks ago. The Democrats are have already accepted +Fences at the boarder.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-joint-res...
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/21/t...
If Trump dials back his rhetoric and asks for a fence, I bet you this shutdown will end. Heck, if the Senate takes up the Democrats's +$1.3 Billion offer, this whole thing could be over on Monday.
Senate hasn't passed a bill yet in any case. As I said earlier: the Senate is where bills typically die. Nothing new there. But Republicans don't want a fence, they want a wall. Otherwise, they would have passed H.J Res.1 / HR 21 already.
Trump's base wants a wall. That's where the debate is stuck right now. They aren't accepting a fence.
I realize this is being portrayed in the media as a total government shutdown, but that's really not the case.
The US has multiple levels of government. Federal, State, County, and Municipal.
State, County, and Municipal governments (which are the ones that really provide essential services), are operating normally.
For the Federal government, any self-sufficient or quasi-self-sufficient operations (like the USPTO, USPS, etc.) are unaffected. Any operations that already had their budgets passed are unaffected.
We're talking about a fraction of the total government here. There's more drama here than anything else.
Yes, there are people whose lives are affected, but they're a small fraction of the population. I believe there were estimates of 400k? Even if we bump that up to a million to be conservative, we're talking about 0.25% of the population.
Wrong. The Federal Budget was done in steps. Only 25% of the government was under debate on Dec 2017, so only that 25% of the Federal Government was shutdown.
In 2014 (IIRC), there WAS a total government shutdown for a few days.
> We're talking about a fraction of the total government here. There's more drama here than anything else.
25% of the federal government is roughly 800,000 workers who have gotten a $0.0 paycheck yesterday, while most of them were forced to keep working.
Most noticably: Boarder Patrol Agents, TSA Agents, US Air Marshals, and Air Traffic Control agents. They ALL got $0.0 paychecks.
IRS is also affected: the entirety of the IRS got $0 paycheck yesterday.
The fact that airports keep working are because these TSA Agents + Air Traffic controllers have decided that keeping the airports open are more important than getting a paycheck. Salute them next time you see one and thank them for their sacrifice. Airports literally can't function without air-traffic control, and TSA have a thankless job.
That's what I said.
> 25% of the federal government is roughly 800,000 workers who have gotten a $0.0 paycheck yesterday, while most of them were forced to keep working.
I calculated off of a million, so that's still below that.
> The fact that airports keep working are because these TSA Agents + Air Traffic controllers have decided that keeping the airports open are more important than getting a paycheck.
Pretty sure they're required to keep working by law?
> Salute them next time you see one and thank them for their sacrifice.
What? What sacrifice? They're going to get paid when this is over. They also took the job knowing something like this happens every other year. This is not new.
A delay'd paycheck is certainly a sacrifice for a number of people. Not everyone has emergency funds saved up, and a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck.
> They also took the job knowing something like this happens every other year. This is not new.
This is one of the few times a shutdown has lasted long enough to actually cause a missed paycheck. The last cases where a shutdown caused a missed paycheck was 2014, and before that 1995.
Its certainly not "normal".
> Overall it seems potentially damaging and disruptive for any organisation or individuals with dependencies on the government.
Most people do not have dependencies on the government. You could live through a shutdown without noticing it had happened if not for the news coverage.
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/09/683642605/how-is-the-shutdown...
This isn't to say that the shutdown isn't a big deal but it should be grounded in the reality of who and what it actually affects.
The typical American could, at this point, realistically not notice anything is happening if it weren't for the news.
I'm not saying they're closed; I'm talking about food inspections. Remember the romaine scare from November? Guess what won't be flagged early during this government shutdown?
While people should take seriously the recent outbreak of E. coli food poisoning that triggered the alert, the fact that it was flagged early shows that the agency once known as the CDC deserves its upgraded name as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-pe...
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Also, let's talk about this:
The remainder are people who are on the invisible end of society... it should be grounded in the reality of who and what it actually affects.
44 million Americans use SNAP benefits. 5 million Americans are of indigenous descent. 800,000 Americans employed by the federal government are not getting paychecks. Some ostensibly large percentage of the 3.7 million federal contractors are not getting paychecks. That's about one-sixth of the population of the United States. Maybe typical Americans should pay more attention to their neighbors and friends.
It might be harder for the FDA to track down the source of a similar outbreak now, since they are partially (but not completely) shut down, but we would know about it.
None of the groups you listed are uniformly distributed across society. "Six social groups each containing 0 people on food stamps, and one social group in which people are mostly on food stamps" is closer to reality than "seven social groups each of which have about 1/7 of the membership on food stamps".
The whole point of living in a nice neighborhood is that none of your neighbors or friends are on food stamps.
Can you explain further? Because it sure sounds like you're somehow equating people being on food stamps as being bad neighbors or friends. I'd like you to explain your logic here.
They are fairly likely to be good neighbors to each other, in that impoverished people are generally part of a favor-trading network with family and neighbors. But they are undesirable neighbors to other people.
I've lived near people on food stamps before, either due to temporary circumstances or permanent ones. I'd like you to properly explain your reasoning here considering it's ringing 'White Flight' alarms in my head.
This... sounds like you agree that the residents of good neighborhoods are trying to stay out of bad ones. What are you trying to dispute?
the shutdown is maddening but we seem to have come to accept it as a normal escalation tactic. what concerns me more is the move away from norms to laws restraining the executive branch. that can potentially reduce the effectiveness of future presidents and shift the careful balance of federal power in ways we may not like. but on the flip side, i'm glad the federal government has been shown (so far) to be resilient to an inept president.
Most services I need are run by my state. I can’t really think of anything federal I need beside the IRS in February.
I generally feel bad for federal employees in my area. My credit union is extending interest free loans and some banks are allowing people to postpone mortgage payments. There are two sides to the coin and many banks are actually giving predetory type loans.
EDIT: I'm referring to the employees here, not contractors
Almost in place; the bill in question still needs to be signed by the President. All indications are that he will.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s24
In general, there is nothing that guarantees back pay after a shutdown, though it has happened in every shutdown so far.
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2017-02-16/judge-orders...
But it hasn't personally affected me yet. I am not a government employee and at the moment I am not in need of any of the government services that are shut down.
As for if they will get paid afterward, well legally the government cannot promise that. Legally it's possible that the new budget may even disband something like the TSA and all of the workers who have been working for free would be even more screwed. But historically every shutdown ended with giving back pay to the workers who had to work for free. They just can't guarantee it.
Yes and no. Excepted service employees, which includes most of the TSA, are guaranteed to receive back pay for time worked during the shutdown, as agencies are required to pay for services performed. However, Congress and the President must pass and a sign a bill explicitly paying workers who were furloughed (i.e., non-essential and non-excepted employees).
As the shutdown continues, excepted and essential workers may be entitled to double pay due to the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Those bills passed by the House include substantial funding for border security. All sides are in agreement about the necessity of border security. A single side and a small group of men on that side are holding the lives of 800k federal workers and the lives, health and prosperity of the public at ransom. They’re doing this in order to get a cheap political “win” for a border wall. A wall that will be ineffective and will never be built even if they’re handed the money to build it, due to the enormous ecological, logistical and legal barriers to do so.
Now that a whole pay period has passed, the situation will become more tense & I expect a change to occur soon.
I hope Democrats make a deal with Trump, in which case Democrats win something (like real DACA legislation), Trump wins funding authorized for more border walls (less than what Democrats authorized several years ago for similar ones), and the government opens back up. The alternative is Democrats win nothing, Trump wins athority over many more billions of dollars via the national emergency route, and the governemnt opens back up - DACA later becomes an unsolved issue when the Supreme Court (likley) strikes it down.
It's definitely not healthy though.
A business also wants to be as resourceful as possible with the money it has. It won't hire people for "bullshit jobs" (as Graeber calls them), when it could either not have the role or could replace it with a robot. Governments on the other hand, will hire people just to spend the money it has, or to justify increasing the amount it needs to collect.
As you rightly note, people aren't outraged because they see that despite the government being shut down, that the country is still running OK for most part. Then clearly not all of those federal employee roles are necessary. Perhaps if they were cut back to the bare minimum, taxpayers could be saving a lot of money? People are more outraged at the idea that they're paying for government employees to have bullshit jobs, and thinking we should have shutdowns more often.
The other thing is the vast majority of the government's budget is Medicare, DoD, and social security which are all still operating to my knowledge.
Governments operate federal parks, but there are also private parks which are just as well kept, sometimes even better - and they do it at much lower costs. See for example, this small public bathroom which cost $2M to build: https://twitter.com/JohnStossel/status/1077921975123804162
Such enormous waste of resources is so common in many areas of government, and if they operated like any regular business they would be bankrupt overnight. Of course it did not take $2M to build that little shack - there is a huge amount of corruption and everyone involved is taking their slice of the taxpayer's money.
In Texas I've been to over ten government run parks (like ones you'd go camping in), and I've never even heard of a private one.
The real problem is government is too damn big that it becomes impossible to separate out such concerns from every other aspect of government, and each time government expands, it adds more inefficiencies.
A park should be a self-contained enterprise so that it doesn't need outside government spending. If you take for example, Shinjuku Gyoen in Tokyo, you need to pay 100 yen to enter the park. The park gets millions of visitors a year, and the money it takes can easily pay for the upkeep of the park. It could be completely private, but in this particular case it is inherited from the imperial estate and is run by the government. The fee has the additional advantage that it keeps out vandals and thugs - only people who want to enjoy the park will pay for it.
Highways in Japan are mostly toll roads too. They're operated as companies with the intent on making profit. Some are privately owned, although most are government owned. The "who will build the roads?" complaint is one of the most common attempts to retort the argument for small government.
You and I both know this is not the cause of a 86% of expenditures.
> The real problem is government is too damn big that it becomes impossible to separate out such concerns from every other aspect of government, and each time government expands, it adds more inefficiencies.
Do you mean too damn big by % of gdp? If so we could double the size of social security and not change the costs of infrastructure.
Do you mean too damn big by employment? If so during census years infrastructure costs don't change much.
If you mean by number of regulations? I think reducing regulations could definitely decrease the cost of infrastructure, but this isn't what most people mean when they talk about the size of government. Texas is a very conservative state with little welfare, not very many services provided by the government, but we have an enormous amount of regulations. An incredible amount of red tape and laws.
This is missing my point. The point is that if it were a private development, then they would be sacked and replaced. This isn't some isolated case and many areas of government are similarly ineffective. The problem is that you can't just replace the one area - the government isn't modular enough to fix its individual parts - it's a monolith.
When I say the government is too big - it's trying to do too many things, and does most of them badly. Markets are better at selecting for efficiency than a single centralized entity. Each 'ministry' or whatnot should be a distinct entity, and should operate like a for-profit business. If one ministry is performing poorly, it could be replaced with a different company in a free market. The threat that they could lose such a contract would force them to perform. No performance, no job - like the rest of us.
To be clear, I'm not for "no government," but for very limited government and little regulation. Governments should not be interfering in markets for instance. Things like environmental regulations are obviously more complex issues which require people to come together for solutions rather than competing.
Another example of a more free market is the education system in Sweden. Instead of funding people to go to the nearest public school to them, they give vouchers for education which are redeemable at any school, private or public, and children can choose. There are no restrictions on location. Because private schooling is almost always better than public schooling, this system has caused the public schools to improve out of necessity - they're competing for children to get the funding - in turn the private schools need to innovate to retain their edge. The result is an overall improvement of the entire education of the country, and reduced government spending.
This is just passing the buck. Right now the government bid out the creation of a bathroom and it was done expensively. But you are arguing that if the government bid out the entire parks system it would be done really well? I don't follow the logic. In my experience the more complex the RFP the more the sophisticated parties(the bidders) are going to fuck the unsophisticated party(the government). It's easy to specify what a bathroom should be and take the lowest bid. It's way harder to do that with the park's department.
And not everyone thinks the Swedish model is a success. Lots of people blamed them for causing Sweden to have some of the fastest dropping test scores in the world. And I'm not arguing privatization is always a failure. I'm just arguing that it's not always a success, and that it's success and failure is dependent upon how it's done. I'm not sure why you are so privatization is always a success every time when clearly the historical record says it's a mix of successes and failures.
You argue the government should be smaller. 5/6ths of the government is insurance(medicare/medicaid/social security)+military and then 1/6th is everything else. That includes education, protecting the environment, funding research, parks etc..
I would love the government to be smaller, I don't think we need to spend so much on the military but I do like social security, medicare, and medicaid. I don't want to be in the position where I have to decide between mortgaging my house or letting an elderly relative die of cancer. And it's really nice we don't have to make those decisions.
Eastern Oregon has gone the route at one point for fire fighting, and recently went and closed libraries, leaving it to local towns to rebuild said service. Private offerings for services that are a public good tend to either be expensive and poor quality (unreliable, limited service) for these things that were formerly community funded, leaving me with little faith that privitization would do anything besides add cost.
Government is like a conglomerate and each area of interest is like a subsidiary. The problem is, every single one of their subsidiaries is constantly in the red, year on year. They're completely bankrupt! The only way they survive is by lending more money and collecting more taxes, instead of operating like for-profit businesses which create wealth, rather than take it away.
You can still have community funded enterprises, but they need to be affordable, in the sense that there is not an infinite pot of money they can keep pulling from if they overspend. A fire-service, for example, could charge residents of an area a small monthly fee for operating in that area - and those not willing to pay the fee would simply be deprioritized in the event of any fire on their property. Business owners could pay a premium to have a higher priority. Ideally the fire service will operate in profit, and such profits can be used to improve the service or even partially reimburse the creditors if they've 'overpaid' for the service.
This kind of system obviously can't operate together with the public service if taxes are forcibly collected for the latter. People aren't going to pay for something they've already paid for. To put these systems in place, the existing public services need to be privatized (joint-stock where the users of the service can be part owners), and their tax needs to be reduced by at least the amount they were previously paying which contributed to the former loss-making enterprise.
The overall point is that this system can be self-correcting on a per-service basis. You don't need to wait 4 years to pick between two companies to perform all the services if they're doing badly. If a service is doing badly, and there is a demand for something better, somebody will fill that gap. The mere presence of a big monolithic government is a hinderance to innovation in any service that it provides. The only way the services get improved are from the inside - there is no outside pressure to innovate - much less so if it means that the people inside might be risking their own jobs by making the service more efficient.
Feed hungry children, and make Statues of past leaders for city squares.
Now imagine the budget of the government was cut in half by Congress. Which of these two things do you think they would stop doing?
The answer is very likely to stop feeding hungry children. Tax payers will feel that pain and become irate at the budget cuts and demand the budget be reinstated.
If they stopped producing statues, taxpayers would probably not notice and wonder why the budget was so high to begin with.
So it goes with the American federal government. The departments shut down things that will cause the most pain, fear, anger to the public until the public demands budgetary reinstatement.
Credits to Thomas Sowell for the analogy.
If you want a good laugh and also see what the fed wastes money on, go look at Rand Paul’s Festivus thread on Twitter.
Yes, there's tremendous waste in the public sector.
But I've worked for large private enterprises most of my career, and there is astronomical waste there too.
I'd bet a year's salary that the waste in large private organizations is far greater than in large government organizations.
This week I read up on Reagan's firing of 11000 flight controllers because the union that formerly supported him demanded better working conditions. It took a decade for air traffic control to regain the old levels.
For sound political reasons. You may not like those reasons, but they aren't being "obtuse" in the sense they do not understand what they are doing because they lack the wits to comprehend. Minimizing your opponent with those kinds of terms risks you underestimating them.
The "base" that voted in most of the Senate voted in Trump. At the federal level, they pretty much count as a single voting bloc, and that's very powerful in the electoral landscape. And for that base, the wall is very nearly a single-issue vote factor (among a few other issues that base holds similarly dear). You may not like it for various practical reasons, but they currently vote slightly more consistently than Democrats in slightly more precincts where it counts. This might tilt soon to Democrats for demographic reasons, but for the purposes of analyzing this record-breaking shutdown, we must take this base's effect seriously.
Both the Republican senators and Trump need to at a minimum show that base that they were overridden by the Democrats on the wall issue, or they will definitively lose in 2020. Unfortunately, the Democrats do not hold a super-majority to force both houses to pass a bill, retrieve a veto from Trump, then override the veto. So the Democrats are stuck in a deadlock legislatively.
Where the Republicans are vulnerable is public sentiment. If the Democrats stir up public sentiment against Senate Republicans by somehow showing all Democrat politicians are throwing in their financial lot with affected Federal workers and simultaneously casting the GOP Senate Republicans as "Richie Rich" Marie Antoinette's, then that can weaken Senate Republican resolve to block Democrat-sponsored funding bills enough to punt the ball into the executive branch with some ass-covering statements to their base that they were somehow legislatively outmaneuvered by the dasterdly Democrats.
The problem with this kind of approach is realistically, even many Democrat senators are relatively wealthy [1], and quite a few Republican senators are not Scrooge McDuck diving into gold coin piles. It's political theatrics through caricatures, and Trump has a proven, astonishing ability to out-theatrics his opponents and make it stick (that's the part that continues to surprise me), and that's a wildcard.
But if the Democrats somehow neutralize the Federal workers' pain, and convincingly show they can outlast the Republicans (probably by showing they'll take it all the way to 2020 if necessary), then they defang the GOP's obstructive strategy. It would take a hell of a big war chest, however. Which is why I don't see it ever happening.
Would love to hear others' ideas on how Democrats can force Trump's hand on this shutdown issue, as this is certainly an interesting political problem that will be studied in the future by students of politics.
[1] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/apr...
But again, this is something where the Republicans have lied to their base, stoked a fake immigration crisis using nativism, and is now forced to lie in a bed they made.
So this is what they get for stoking populist, nativist fear.
I'd love to be proved wrong, but I think the Democrats have backed themselves into a no-win situation. If they give in on the wall, it's an outright Republican victory. If they don't give in on the wall and the shutdown continues, it's a victory for the "small government" part of the Republican base, who will point to the shutdown as proof that the federal government can be safely reduced in size.
And I agree with you that it's unlikely the Democrats will be able to appeal to the economic situation of the affected workers to override a veto. The Democratic leadership has been terrible at forging a consistent message other than "we don't like Trump". They've let themselves be branded as the "social issues party" and let the Republicans brand themselves as the "economy party"; which means they're at a severe disadvantage when it comes to economic issues.
Sure, there may be a racist component to the immigration debate, but most peoples' concerns are primarily economic: "they're" going to take "our" jobs[1]. I also can't think of anything the Democrats could give up as a bargaining chip. Concessions on the ACA would alienate their own base. They'd look disingenuous agreeing to additional tax cuts after making such a big deal of the previous cuts. I'm not sure with what else they could negotiate.
[1] Here the racism is more tribalism than outright "I'm superior because of my race"
If air traffic controllers start to quit for example, and air travel starts to shut down, then as a stopgap if it isn't a wide enough impact, Trump can order the armed forces to help direct air traffic. If it is a big enough impact, then the GOP can allow for a targeted bill just for the air traffic controllers. The DNC then finds itself in an unenviable position. Block the targeted funding bill just for the ATC's, and the mayhem squarely lands on them. Allow it to pass, and they start losing political points in this dominance game. It's not good optics for the DNC either way.
For some issues like food safety, we're not going to run into PRC-level, pre-FDA era food supply chain adulteration overnight, many fiscal quarters and years is more likely. It took decades in the PRC before the adulteration got to the levels we see today, and they still don't experience political unrest from it. The longer this shutdown runs, the more ammunition the DNC is handing GOP "small government" advocates' rhetoric (as over-caricatured as that rhetoric will be, and as wrong in its over-simplification it is, it will play well to the GOP base). The GOP wet dream is the shutdown drags on indefinitely, and they get to "starve the beast" by reverse-budgeting: find out what part of civilizational collapse becomes unacceptable due to lack of operations, fund only those parts, and devil take the hindmost. That's like a nightmare scenario for the DNC.
It can get worse, too. ATC example above: Trump orders a vestigial FAA to tell everyone using airspace they now can only access airspace if their special usage-tax is fully paid up, and budget all critical FAA functions via pure utility revenue collections. Or designates a private company to administer the airspace management, who collects revenue, and is granted by executive power the ability to regulate access to airspace, and disband the FAA. The salivating within GOP think tanks is almost audible.
The DNC appears to my casual observation to be playing right into the GOP's hands. I'm far, far from some kind of politics wonk/hacker, though. So I'd sure like to be shown a way out of the DNC's dilemma by political hackers who follow this stuff much more than I do.
I think if the DNC can put together a two-plus year budget plan in exchange for caving on the wall, then they take this corner they've been painted into out of the GOP's hands. By no means should the DNC accept temporary budget bills for just a month or so: that just loads more bullets into the chamber to shoot the DNC with more shutdowns.
By refusing to compromise ($5.7B is about a quarter of the estimated $25B entire wall project), the DNC backed the GOP into a corner with their base, where the GOP politicians got nothing to lose by pushing back. By raising the stakes into "for all the marbles", the DNC told these GOP politicians they have nothing to lose by demanding the entire $25B instead. If the DNC is going to play that kind of hardball, I sure would love to be a fly on the wall to hear what their strategy is.
One of the bills passed this week: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/21?s...
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/04/house-passes-bill-to-end-gov...
This is flatly untrue. The House passed an appropriations bill [0] on the first day they were in session (Jan 3), and it has been waiting for a vote in the Senate since then.
No, he's asking for it for a wall, not for border security; wall's are't security, they're security theater. Actual security requires people, not walls. Most illegals fly in on Visa's and just over stay, they don't sneak in through the desert. Walls are easily by ladders, ropes, and shovels, only an idiot like Trump would want to spend billions on a wall.
> In the end, nothing good will come out of this shutdown.
Some people believe increasing border security and funding to reduce crime, reduce sex trafficking, and better protect border agents and law enforcement as good.
[1] https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=nasa.gov&latest
[2] http://ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=justice.gov&latestBut I really don't think the Republicans can win this argument. When they controlled both houses and the presidency they couldn't pass the wall funding. So I'm not sure why they think they can do it after losing the houses. Especially since this politically hurts them among independents far more than it hurts the Democrats.