The Overthinker's Journal

Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!

You wake up from your slumber to hear your smoke detector going off. You bolt up in your bed and can smell smoke. You look out and see a yellow orange glow coming from downstairs. Your house is on fire!!!

What do you do? Grab your essentials? Round up your pets? Your wallet? Phone? Laptop? Maybe you only have time to save yourself.

Okay, let’s give you a little more time. Recent natural disasters are perfect here… A hurricane is churning towards your town and you’ve been ordered to evacuate!

Or maybe a wildfire is roaring down your block!

What do you take with you? Again, the essentials, right? You might have a little more time. Maybe you grab your photo albums? Maybe you throw a suitcase of clothes together? Medicine and toiletries? That first edition copy of To Kill a Mockingbird?

What’s my point?

Well, in a couple of weeks, government agencies are going to go through an unfortunately all too familiar exercise. Preparing for a government shutdown when the budget runs out on March 14th.

Part of that planning mirrors your grabbing of the “essentials.” Every agency is going over a list of their employees as we speak. They are trying to decide who is “excepted,” and will be asked to continue working during the shutdown, and who is “non-excepted” and will be sent home.

The only difference this time? DOGE is licking their chops ready for it! Because they are going to argue, “well, if you didn’t need those employees during the shutdown, then they’re not essential. Why do you need them at all?”

The fact is, there are things that must get taken care of no matter what. Then there are things that should be taken care of, but cannot be sustained during the shutdown. That doesn’t make the latter “illegal” or even “unnecessary.”

Would you argue that you don’t need your refrigerator? After all, you didn’t take it with you.

Your last 7 years of tax receipts?

Your smoke detectors?

That exercise bike that you not rode once, but have used as a clothes rack since you got it? Okay… I’m not saying there are no things the government does that they could cut.

Is there waste in the government? Of course. But, the middle of a shutdown (or a natural disaster for that matter) is not the time to decide what we need to get rid of.

Just because an agency labels an employee or a mission as ‘non-essential’ during a shutdown doesn’t mean they’re unnecessary. Or worse, an example of fraud, waste, or abuse.

It simply means that, in an emergency, some functions have to pause. When the crisis passes, those roles and responsibilities still matter.

The real danger isn’t in what gets temporarily set aside. It’s in assuming those things were never needed in the first place.