“Shutdown” Chaos at I.R.S. Wrecks Employee Morale

The U.S. federal government “shutdown” forced the IRS to furlough 88% of its employees. The agency then recalled about half of them, calling them “essential employees”, so they could back up Trump’s last-minute promise that the IRS would still send out tax refunds even without an operating budget.

But the agency could not issue paychecks while the shutdown continued, which was great for morale, as you might imagine. Many employees took advantage of a union contract provision to say “I would prefer not to” when asked to report to work without pay (one report says fewer than half of them showed up when ordered to do so; 14,000 stayed home). Some decided to do a little extra paid work on the side instead.

The grumbling broke out into public protests by IRS workers in some places. Another report said that each week of the shutdown roughly 25 information technology workers were bailing to take jobs elsewhere.

As a result, the agency told Congress it will need at least a year to recover from the resulting backlog of work and the disruption.

The government has only reopened temporarily. The political conflict underlying the kerfluffle was never resolved, and Congress will either have to pass a budget or another short-term spending patch (and President Bluster will have to sign it) by the middle of next month or the whole “shutdown” impasse begins again.

In other news: The gilets jaunes protests in France have dovetailed with an ongoing campaign to disable or destroy traffic-ticket-generating cameras. Something like two thousand of the cameras — roughly two-thirds of those in the country — have been attacked, causing costs to the government — to repair them, and from lost ticket revenue — of more than half a billion euros. And apparently the government has stopped repairing them for now — deciding to wait for things to die down, as their repairs are so quickly undone.

The latest news includes:

• 15 of the 22 speed cameras in Sarthe are out of business
• Thirteen radars in Vendée burned overnight
• As soon as they’re put back into service, they’re damaged again says a report from Fougeres
• 18 out of 32 are disabled in Vienne, three-quarters of those in Occitanie, and half of those in Auxerrois
• A radar in Puy de Dome was also re-disabled
• A little spray paint was all it took in Saint-Quentin
• Fire took out the radar at Chaux, on the Caen-Dover highway, in Bolbec, in Sainte-Sigolène, at the Crulai exit, in Picardie, in Châlons, in Mathieu, and in Varaville
• Nine cameras in Territoire de Belfort are defunct (“Some, like that of the RN 1019 in Bourogne have suffered a relentless barrage of attacks since early November: tagged, wrapped, burned, severed from its base, and recently removed outright.”)
• Three-quarters of the radars in Arrageois are blinded, as are half of those in Orne
• A dozen ticket cameras were vandalized in the Vendée
• A radar at the Cornil tunnel was put to the torch, the one at the Louvigné-de-Bais exit, one near the racecourse at Granada, two in Ille-et-Vilaine, another in Couvrot, and one at Cloyes-les-Trois-Rivières
• The camera at Availles-en-Châtellerault was ripped apart, having recently been replaced after being burned.
• In the Doller Valley, things went the other way around as a once-painted-over, recently-repaired radar went up in flames
• A pair of Drôme radars got painted over
• A recently-repaired radar in Reims was quickly tagged back to an inoperative state
• Some paint and a good shove was all it took to knock one out on the road to Verneuil
• Someone taped a taunting sign over a radar near the police station in Saint-Quentin
• The radar at Bourogne has suffered long enough and was finally put out of its misery
• Some Germans got into the act in Wuppertal, hauling the whole thing away, Italian vandals knocked out radars in Latisana, Rocca Priora, and Sestriere, and there seems to be an epidemic of destruction in Belgium and Russia too.