An unintended consequence? Shutdown highlights the importance and value of government.

By James Hohmann
January 24 at 10:05 AM

With Joanie Greve

THE BIG IDEA: Many conservative hard-liners inside and closely allied with the Trump administration, who have made careers out of bashing the federal bureaucracy, believed a partial shutdown would validate their view that government can function just fine without “nonessential” employees. In fact, the past 33 days have done the opposite.

It turns out that just because workers have been categorized as “nonessential” does not mean the work they do is not important. That’s why President Trump keeps calling back more and more furloughed workers to do things like process tax refunds, inspect food, approve loans and issue food stamps.

With no end in sight to the five-week-old impasse, the effects are poised to become both worse and more obvious to more people. One enduring result could be that Americans collectively come to appreciate the value government provides in their everyday lives to a greater degree. The federal court system, for instance, may need to halt major operations after Feb. 1, and the Agriculture Department does not have funding to pay food stamp benefits come March to roughly 40 million people.

Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural address that government could not provide the solution to our problems. “Government is the problem,” he declared. This has been a dominant mentality of the Reagan epoch, which arguably we continue to live in 38 years after he gave that speech. After all, even Bill Clinton declared in 1996 — just days after the end of what until this month was the longest shutdown ever — that “the era of big government is over.” The problem of the present moment, however, is that the government is increasingly struggling to deliver services and benefits that many Americans count on, even if they take them for granted.

-- For the slay-the-beast types who hold plum posts in the Trump administration, this shutdown has turned into a teachable moment on what exactly the government does and how important it is to people’s lives. It’s so easy to score cheap political points by talking in the abstract about government “waste.” It’s hard to actually trim “fat” because, almost always, it turns out there’s either a powerful political constituency or a legitimate policy justification for virtually everything federal agencies do.

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