Daniel Huff: Government Shutdown? No--An Efficiency Audit

I don't know, but this sounds reasonable:

This approach—furlough broadly, identify failures, restore specific functions—is vastly more efficient than conventional budget cutting. Successive shutdowns have refined the data. The Office of Management and Budget produces detailed post-shutdown reports analyzing what worked and what didn’t, creating institutional learning that improves planning. For example, the fiscal 2014 shutdown generated data on which services generated outcry when suspended (national parks), which created safety risks (fewer inspections by the Food and Drug Administration), and which caused surprisingly little disruption.

But all I can really say about this, knowing virtually nothing about it, nothing about what it looks like from the inside, is that it doesn't sound crazy. Maybe it's worth a shot.