Credit: Barack Obama / Foter / CC BY-NC-SAAs threatened, during the
government shutdown many federal agencies have sent their websites
the same way as the dodo bird and the non-essential government
worker. Sort of.

“Many government Web sites will be down,”
warned The Washington Post hours before the
shutdown began. Even First Lady Michelle Obama asserted that her Twitter account
would fall victim to the shutdown. It has not been updated since.

Numerous sources gnashed their teeth over the possibility of
the National Zoo’s “Panda Cam” going dark. It
did. However, as Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute points
out, there was no apparent consistent action among
agencies:

It’s a bit hard to make sense of why some sites remain up (some
with a “no new updates” banner) while others are redirected to a
shutdown notice page—and in many cases it’s puzzling why a shutdown
would be necessary at all.

Among his examples are NASA.gov,
which redirects to a notice that the government shutdown has
rendered the site unavailable. However, he poked around and found
that various subdomains still work.
“Still weirder,” Sanchez says, is the Federal Trade Commission’s
(FTC) site, which
previews its normal content, but suddenly snaps to a notice that
prevents anyone from using the site. He points out “that means…
their servers are still up and running and actually serving all the
same content. In fact they’re serving more content.”

Mike Masnick of Techdirt.com
writes, “It’s difficult to see how this helps anyone at all.
But it does yet a good job (yet again) of demonstrating that logic
and bureaucracy don’t often go well together.”

According to a
memorandum issued by the Office of the President, whether the
digital embargoes help anyone or not is not the issue. In fact,
whether “the cost of shutting down a website exceeds the cost of
maintaining services” is of no significance.

There are practical explanations. Servers and websites do not
run themselves. If they are to remain active, security and other
features must be maintained. Likewise, any sites with active
fill-out forms could lead to an overflow for agencies once the
shutdown ends.

Nevertheless, Sanchez suggests NASA and the FTC may also be
engaging in a virtual “Washington Monument Syndrome” to parallel
the tactic of blocking the most visible government services like
national parks and war memorials. The same is likely true for the
First Lady’s twitter account, which incurs no cost to the
government whatsoever.