As promised—or threatened, if you wandered over to Reason by accident—the Trump administration has started using the government sort-of-shutdown as an opportunity to engage in mass layoffs of federal employees. In the game of chicken between Republicans and Democrats over just how much the government should overspend and on what, the losers so far appear to be some of the almost 3 million Americans who thought federal employment would be a comfortable way to collect a paycheck.

Setting thousands of former government workers loose to seek jobs elsewhere—preferably not involving money forcibly extracted from taxpayers—is a step in the right direction.

As we all should know by now, government shutdowns are largely political theater. National parks and museums are closed to inconvenience the

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