Steffen Schmidt

Iowa View contributor

FBI agents are not being paid because of the layoff. The Coast Guard suggested that family members could walk dogs, babysit or have garage sales to make ends meet, as they face no paychecks. Airports are struggling to get enough TSA agents to screen passengers and lines are getting longer and slower.

A million federal employees and private contractors are working without pay or furloughed. President Trump has said these are mostly Democrats. It’s also worth noting that they are government employees so they fall into the category of workers for the “deep state” as Breitbart’s Steve Bannon has called them. The “deep state” is “big government” which as Ronald Reagan stated, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government IS the problem."

Then it seems that laying off or forcing government workers to work with no pay is not a “problem,” it’s actually a solution to big government.

The Air Traffic Controllers association is worried that many of its employees are now retiring early or quitting to find other jobs because they will not work without pay. Is it a coincidence that President Reagan began his trimming of government by crushing the air traffic controllers' union and now we see a second round of pressure on these vital managers of our air space?

If you want to shrink big government a shutdown is just what the doctor ordered. So are a budget deficit and an exploding national debt. “How so?” you ask.

The answer is that the bigger the deficit and the bigger the national debt the more unsustainable big government becomes. It’s like a company that is bled of funding, loaded with impossible debt and then shut down. There is no other explanation to the runaway deficit and debt train that is rushing down a hill to catastrophe.

Several years ago, a conservative Republican friend of mine speculated how to best stop the continued growth of the federal government. Pushing the costs of government by increasing spending and blowing up the debt with big tax cuts was EXACTLY what we discussed.

There is no other reasonable explanation for why our Republican congressional leadership, which in the past was known as “fiscally conservative,” is now comfortable with a grossly bloated budget and deeply shrinking revenue precipitated by budget cuts. It has to be a deliberate strategy to disable the deep state.

Whether it will backfire depends on how deep the wounds of disabled federal agencies and programs hurt farmers, air travelers, FBI crime investigations, and counterterrorism monitoring by government agencies of cyber attacks.

In my American Government class, we do an exercise where students analyze how government affects them positively and negatively. Most of them are amazed, for better or worse, how much of their lives and those of their employers, educators and their family depends on smart and uninterrupted functioning local, state and federal government. The shutdown is likely to make millions of Americans suddenly realize how much of their lives are affected by these programs.

In deeply Republican Texas, South Carolina and Florida, hurricane recovery victims will be shocked to see their relief funding used to fund a wall on the Mexican border. If that happens, the shutdown will actually work against the small government movement.

Steffen Schmidt is a professor of political science at Iowa State University.