@Flyslinger2 wrote:
Or someone is not happy with Trump's politics and chooses this method to express themselves?
I fear Mark may be onto something. A quick check of several top level Departmental web sites directly affected by the shutdown shows the following:
Department of Justice, https://www.justice.gov/
Site is available, but static (unchanged content) with the following statement:
"Due to the lapse in appropriations, Department of Justice websites will not be regularly updated. The Department’s essential law enforcement and national security functions will continue. Please refer to the Department of Justice’s contingency plan for more information."
Department of Homeland Security, https://www.dhs.gov/
Site is available, but static (unchanged content) with the following statement:
"Due to the lapse in federal funding, this website will not be actively managed."
Department of Commerce, https://www.commerce.gov/
NOTE: this is the parent department for NIST.
Site is available, but static (unchanged content) with the following statement:
"Due to the lapse in Congressional Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2019, the U.S. Department of Commerce is closed. Commerce Department websites will not be updated until further notice. For more information, see Shutdown Due to Lapse of Congressional Appropriations."
However, when you go to the NIST site, https://www.nist.gov/
the situation is starkly different, with this message:
"NOTICE: Due to a lapse in government funding, this and almost all NIST-affiliated websites will be unavailable until further notice. Learn more
NIST websites for programs using non-appropriated funds (NVLAP and PSCR) or those that are excepted from the shutdown (such as NVD) will continue to be available and updated."
The NIST site managers appear to have taken a page from the Obama Administration during their big shutdown, where they went out of their way to close operations specifically to add pain to the general public. Actions at that time included putting up barriers on the National Mall to block access to the many memorials, including the World War II memorial, and to block the use of parking lots at the end of the George Washington Parkway to prevent visitors at Mount Vernon, which is NOT a government property and was not closed by the shutdown.
The fact that the NIST site was actively closed, rather than allowed to passively operate without update (as the DOJ, DHS, and Commerce sites did) does, indeed, suggest that malcontents in NIST went out of their way to cause pain.
Grandpa Rob @rslade is right.. it was lot more work to close the entire site than to simply add a 'no one is home' sign to the home page, as DOJ, Commerce, and DHS did It is particularly noteworthy that Commerce did it right while NIST played the B$ game.
