We reported earlier that non-essential government workers will still get paid for not working once the government reopens.
It’s like a paid vacation, only their paycheck will be a little late — four days and counting.
As it turns out, many park service employees — the biggest whiners during every government shutdown — will actually get paid double for their work at Yellowstone.
And at 17 other national parks across the country, including Rocky Mountain, volunteers have stepped in to do the government’s job.
Private businesses are dishing up thousands of dollars a day to pay park service employees to groom more than 300 miles inside Yellowstone to cater to snowmobilers and a major resort.
Ironically, snowmobile operators already pay a fee for those services. So businesses are paying twice for a service, and park employees will get paid twice for their work.
At Rocky Mountain National Park as well as the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Libertarians are picking up garbage and removing trash.
“As Libertarians, we advocate replacing federal taxpayer funding for many services with private charity or privatization,” said Libertarian National Committee Chair Nicholas Sarwark. “We wanted to show how this could be accomplished by volunteering in our local communities.”
And show us, they did. Some members of an environmental group actually had a flashback of their core mission, got off their lazy butts and pitched in as well.
It appears the National Park Service has actually done us a favor during this shutdown, and showed us that many of their workers are in fact, non-essential.