WASHINGTON — Seven hundred non-essential federal civil servants were furloughed and sent home when the government failed to pass a spending bill Friday night, sources confirmed today.

The other one million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand and three hundred feds remained on the job, having been previously designated as “essential.” That means their work is deemed critical to the continuity of government operations. They will work through the furlough and be paid for it.

The 2013 government shutdown shocked many agencies when they realized they were unable to perform their core functions of maintaining the Deep State, resisting Republican agendas, and ensuring that the administration’s red line in Syria was crossed as easily as is the U.S. southwest border. Since then, nearly all agencies have designated their employees as “essential.”

“There’s another core function many aren't talking talked about — that is maintaining or increasing budgets in consecutive fiscal years," A.Z. Kizzer, a congressional staffer who has served in seventeen consecutive administrations, said. "That is the core competency by which most agencies rate themselves and also the tool used to hand out end-of-year bonuses, which everyone who isn’t furloughed is going to get. Screw those non-essential low-lifes.”

Jimmy “Jimmy John” Kirkens, a furloughed technician at the Yucca Mountain Waste Depository who monitors radiation levels, thinks differently.

“I’m furloughed while the cooks at the cafeteria and the senior executive service leaders are deemed mission essential," he said. "It’s going to suck to be them if the rems or sieverts go sky-high. The cafeteria’s famous ‘Roentgen Burger’ will really be see-though this time.”

But Kizzer argues that the work of people who define feed-lot silage standards, counting lima bean yields by state and county, or who conduct congressional delegation visits to California or Hawaii in the winter — as well as federal employees who fuck lobbyists just to influence or be influenced by them — means that most every federal agency has the resilience to survive a shutdown.

“We taxpayers should be thanking them on bended knee,” he said.

Kizzer contends that from the Department of Oh-God-Another-Never-Ending-War-We-Have-to-Fight to the National Toothpick Standards Bureau, and to the Crack in America agency, citizens can relax, knowing that the federal government essentially hasn’t shut down at all.

“Not that they’d notice anyway,” Kirkens countered

According to government sources, the American public understands that the more they know about what a shutdown really means, the more they understand how well-protected are their freedoms of speech and religion and how safe they are while picking their teeth — even if their government seems to have disappeared.