If You Aren't Essential, Why Are We Paying You?

If nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged in the morning, then being declared non-essential in a government shutdown must do the same thing for federal bureaucrats.

The horror of the "non-essential" label was so great in fact that the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the 2.1 million member federal workforce, stopped using the term a few years ago. Now the official terms are "excepted" and "non-excepted."

But "essential" and "non-essential" more precisely capture the essence of the process for how officials decide which government workers must report to work during a shutdown because America cannot do without their

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