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Comment by adelevie | Hacker News Reader

This is a rather simplistic view of "bosses in the government."

Sure agency heads and managing directors might have their own opinions on the shutdown, especially since they were nominated by President Obama (or appointed by someone who was). But they have their own responsibilities as stewards of an agency. One responsibility is ensuring the agency acts within the law and shields itself from liability. Shutting down a website is a very reasonable measure for minimizing liability when there is no one around to ensure accuracy of content.

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That's a fair point I suppose but I suppose it depends on the website. In general rules and regulations change at a pretty glacial pace. It would seem easy enough to place a disclaimer at the top of every page stating something to the effect of "No email will be answered and the validity of this information may in some cases not be up to date due to the government shutdown". A government website is a public resource that we paid to put into place so as far as I'm concerned it's not really acceptable to shut if off when it takes almost no money and more importantly staff to simply keep it up.

With all this talk o liability, would it not be cheaper to simply add a disclaimer to every homepage, etc, saying "due to the shut down some info may be inaccurate"?

I imagine that might be even easier than going through the steps to ensure a website goes offline. But, that would avoid spreading panic and pain, which is what the powers that be want in order to score points.

It's like the April sequestration all over again.

You're missing the point: people can't touch anything until the shutdown ends. You put up that disclaimer and go home for awhile. Tomorrow, you have drive fail or someone defaces it tomorrow and you cannot – by federal law – fix it until the budget passes, so you're basically hoping the essential staff — who, remember, are juggling a ton of new responsibilities – notice and can at least pull shut it down without causing too much extra damage.

I understand that absolutely CAN happen though in my experience it's fairly rare. However, it's akin to shutting down all public roads because a few may develop potholes we can't fix until funds are available. You are removing a critical resource from the hands of people that paid for it in the first place.

Congress is removing it, not the federal workers following the rules. If you don't like the laws or don't like the way they're stalling on authorizing spending, contact your representatives and express your displeasure.

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