The Producers at the Muny in 2008. Photo by Meetmeatthemuny. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

“The White House budget office,” CNN reports, “is telling federal agencies to prepare plans for mass firings in the event of a government shutdown …”

Programs that these fake “shutdowns” don’t normally affect would “be targeted for sweeping reductions in force that could permanently eliminate jobs that are deemed ‘not consistent’ with President Donald Trump’s priorities.”

The headline characterizes Trump’s latest move as a “threat” intended to encourage Democrats to capitulate, and dissident Republicans to get back on side, in the latest fight over government spending.

Threat?

Maybe to Democrats who can’t bear the thought of any reduction, in any government function, ever.

Maybe to Republicans who have pet programs they know would be affected by “reductions in force.”

The rest of us should reply as Br’er Rabbit did to Br’er Fox’s threat to cook him and eat him: “Oh, Br’er Fox, I don’t care what you do with me, so long as you just don’t throw me in that briar patch over there.”

The two wings of America’s single-party state, and their pet media, treat the threat of a “government shutdown” as existential, and spend a lot more time trying to pre-emptively apportion blame to each other than trying to do a deal.

In reality, these “shutdowns” are pure Hollywood magic, all special effects — “no animals or bureaucrats were harmed in this production.”

Supposedly “non-essential” government operations shut down, raising the question of why, if they’re not “essential,” taxpayers subsidize them in the first place, and making it clear that “non-essential” actually means “provides the best material to elicit public notice.  “You can’t visit your favorite museum … THIS week.”

When a deal gets made, all those “non-essential” operations re-open, complete with turning the government employees’ time off into a retroactive paid vacation.

And the “spending exceeds revenues, guess we have to borrow!” can gets kicked down the road some more.

Trump’s “threat” is that instead of temporarily shutting down some “non-essential” fat, he’ll carve some real meat off the federal government bone.

Good! Do it!

For once, let’s see how small the federal government can get before anything “essential” actually stops happening.

My guess is that if a black hole opened up beneath the District of Columbia and sucked the entire federal government into non-existence, we’d suffer a very short period of re-adjustment before most people realized we’re better off that way.

Please, Br’er President, anything but the briar patch!

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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