USDA is down (opens in new tab)

Also consider that who is furloughed depends on whether the relevant department has classified them as "excepted/essential" or "not-excepted/non-essential". Many departments are sending IT and security personnel home because it is much harder to justify employees (like support, IT, etc) considered ancillary to the department's primary function.

Depending on the requirements and scope of a cabinet website, and without necessary support personnel, it could be considered a risk to leave services running, especially if it's an agency like the USDA that relies primarily on discretionary funding, versus something like the NSA with is funded with mandatory spending and therefore has much more flexibility.

Pretty much this. Note that other government websites are also shut off or otherwise not updating, e.g.:

http://www.aoc.gov/

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/

http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2013/13-A06.html

I'm not sure I understand. Let's say there's a need to have people be on call for the site 24/7 - for many sites it's not the case but let's assume they need it. But these people don't need to be paid hourly. They most probably get salary at the end of the payroll period (monthly or bi-weekly) as everybody else. And even if shutdown would continue that long, they'd just get paid at the next pay period. Now, it may be possible that some people would say "we won't work if we don't know we'd be paid in time" - but they don't know that either way, and their salary probably is not contingent on specific work.

Same with cloud hosting and any other expense - I have hard time believing it is billed hourly. Most probably it is billed monthly - and by the time this months' bill arrives shutdown would be long over. And even if it isn't, I've worked in the past with govt organizations, and not all of them always were the most accurate payers - but I rarely seen any contractor refusing govt job because of that. Everybody knows eventually it will be paid.

So I don't see the reason for the drama. It's not like US government suddenly has no money at all. It's a temporary technical issue with administering cash flows, and everybody knows it is temporary and everybody knows the bills will eventually be paid.

The US government is not being billed in 4 days. They're on a massive contract that is likely paid quarterly. Or likely a net 60 or 90 by purchase order. It isn't like they're on Heroku and the credit card expired.

All of this is true, but the lights are still on, and the T1 line is still piped into their building (not confirmed by visual evidence but it would cost more to shut it down and restart it barring a crisis causing shutdown >1month). Either they think the shutdown is lasting a while or their CTO/CWhateverO has a sense of humor.

So the USDA is largely responsible for our having some of the safest food on the planet. I mean you can mock it all you want, but if USDA meat inspectors aren't there to watch over the production; you might want to consider becoming a lot more vegetarian for a while. I mean, unless you really like eating cows infected with MRSA or Mutton with a side of scrapie...

Seriously, if meat inspection goes by the wayside for any length of time; people will die, because it won't be anybody's job to make sure the meat is safe and the folks who run meat-packing plants don't like that they can't wring every last bit of profit out of every animal they buy.

The USDA agriculture arm (USDA ARS) actually does some really good work with nutrition scientific lab data (USDA SR-25)

I've also talked to several of the scientists for work, and they are quite the bright bunch and a lot do good research work.

However, I don't see why they couldn't leave the server up at least through October as I actually need to read a lot of their latest work.

Right, who needs meat packaging standards!

Salmonella is just a government scare tactic to inflate federal budgets!

Symbolic really. The same servers are sitting there, just idle rather than pumping out pages.

False dichotomy. It could well be that many parts of the site don't function correctly without staff. For example processing submissions, keeping critical data up to date, etc.

A shutdown risk appears every three or so months due to reliance on short term continuing resolutions to fund the government. Most recently, formal preparations began several weeks ago.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/...

Where four hours came from? Talk about govt shutdown was out there for days if not weeks. And this is not the first time - n this administration, almost every year we're on the precipice of the shutdown. If they didn't have a contingency plan that enables them to put an emergency header on top of all pages on the site - they're doing it wrong.

> What the USDA is doing is called "Washington Monument Syndrome".

Where will all the school kids visit if the USDA website is down? What about all of the international tourists that finally made the trip to the USDA website?

You make a completely valid comparison, because everyone knows that after the Washington Monument, the USDA is the most beloved site.

Shouldn't it be renamed "White House tours syndrome" now?

The US Consulate in Marseille, France is open for normal business today. I guess getting a US visa or passport renewal is a critical function that can't wait a week.

Just speculating, but perhaps the IT person(s) responsible for maintaining the site are nonessential, and considered a simple placeholder safer than leaving the full site online and unattended?

The funding to support server + bandwidth + sysadmins.

They're down now, although it almost seems more like a DDoS ("Taking too long to respond").

I realize you're being sarcastic, but food inspections are continuing. From http://www.agweek.com/event/article/id/21778/

  If the U.S. Department of Agriculture shuts down at midnight tonight,
  food stamp benefits will be delivered for the month of October, forest 
  fires will continue to be fought, meat and poultry will still be inspected,
  grain inspection will continue, laboratory animals will be fed and the
  rural development division will still monitor government loans.

  But USDA will not release any new production statistics, most of the
  rest of USDA will shut down and its website may go dark.

Your gun permit is in the bill of rights. Why do you need a web site for that?

In that case the government should stay closed down.

Now that is very interesting. According to this article, earlier this year meat and poultry inspectors were designated 'essential personnel', meaning that they can continue to work even during a government shutdown. This is important because it's against the law to sell meat in the US if it hasn't been inspected by a USDA inspector.

Imagine the outcry if this government shutdown meant that all meat and poultry sales in the US halted until an agreement was reached.

There are some advantages to having a purely static-HTML website, in terms of unattended maintainability.

In addition to the government, it seems many companies don't have one anymore. If servers get compromised, it's common for companies to just take the whole site down pending a fix, and replace it with a single HTML splash page. If they had a full-featured static-HTML version of the site, they could fail over to something more complete than one HTML page, but that seems uncommon.

I thought they shut down Geocities years ago?

My guess is more the former than the latter.

Then again, federal spending can be pretty funky in how Congress requires it be spent. I'd love to see all the information on how the decision to shut down the site was made.

Well that's basically just a static blog site anyway. The USDA site had dynamic information, statistics, graphs. The IT infrastructure for USDA is probably much more complicated than the TSA.