Washington Shutdown – Time for Personal Start-Up
You’ve heard about the shutdown of the Federal government?
Washington DC is closed! Or is it?
Even during the recession when times are bad, the government just hires more so surely the city is shutdown-proof? And yet, there are more than 360,000 federal employees in the DC area, part of the 800,000 across America who last week got a bank transfer of zero.zero dollars.
A number of food banks have opened up in DC, offering free meals to anyone with federal identification. Whole Foods, the upmarket supermarket coming out of Austin, has gone further. It is serving spaghetti dinners to anyone who is hungry.
Last week, it snowed in Washington DC. The government’s Office for Personnel Management announced that federal offices would be closed due to the weather. Nobody noticed. The city is in shutdown mode anyway. This is the so-called ‘Trump Shutdown’ — the longest government shutdown in US history.
Some blame President Donald Trump, others the Democrats – both are as bad as each other, they say. It all adds to the despair about the government. They fell it isn’t working because US politics isn’t working. So who do you blame? The politicians of course!
What you don’t hear is that the shutdown is not as bad you may have heard. Desperate-for-drama journalists hanging around the White House like to make out things are like Armageddon. But the military is still being paid, as are Defense Department officials. There is also the reality that a huge number of federal employees, considered ‘essential’ or ‘excepted’, are working through the shutdown, even if they aren’t being paid. How long this can continue no one knows?
In any event, how American politics works is that state and city agencies are still performing the most essential administrative tasks. As soon as the snow began to fall, trucks began salting and gritting the roads with the same efficiency as before. It may be cold but homes are still being heated. Trash is still being collected except in the national parks where the resident bears are feasting on the trash that hasn’t been picked up. Every cloud has a silver lining!
For entrepreneurs, the Federal shutdown makes us wonder. If so many workers are not ‘essential’ to the government functioning then why does the Federal government employ so many? Is what we are seeing evidence of how bloated the whole federal government has become? What I do know is that entrepreneurs are not waiting for anyone to hand them a paycheck. We get out there and earn it.
Back in 2016 Trump fans wanted him to ‘drain the swamp’, the swamp being the vast swollen bureaucracy of Washington DC. They say that this is the opportunity for the ‘deep state’ — that great enemy of Trumpism — to be reduced in size.
We shall see. What is for certain is hundreds of thousands of American federal employees are living pay-check to pay-check. That is frightening. In places like Washington, the knock-on effect on the private sector is huge, too.
So what is the entrepreneurial approach to all this. Keep doing what you are doing. Get your own economy going. Take back control of your own professional life. Get out of the ‘swamp’, a mental swamp, and free your mind from that inner bureaucracy. The whole thrust of what we do is about keeping moving: both in business and between jurisdictions.
Entrepreneurs are freelancers extraordinaire. The emphasis is on the word “free” – free from the tangled externals, free from official bureaucracy, just plain free! And long may it continue.
