When the National Park Service was threatened with budget cuts (in D.C. this means budget increases less than the pie-in-the-sky wish list of the bureaucracy in question) the head of the “service,” one George Hartzog, shut down the Washington Monument and Mount Rushmore. Members of congress from every state were bombarded with complaints by vacationing constituents about the shutdowns, so the talk of budget “cuts” ceased.
This form of political extortion came to be known as the “Washington Monument Syndrome” and is now routinely used at all levels of government to extort even more revenue from American taxpayers. At the local level of government there is never any admission that cost savings are possible. Instead, garbage collection, police, ambulance services, and school buses are shut down to teach the taxpayers a lesson whenever anyone opposes the bureaucracy.
Yeppers, this is the famous strategy to piss off the voters to bring down wrath upon the congresscritters to make the obvious services available. We can live without the state doing what it does, until proper budgets and bills are passed. If fact, we might just live a lot better with government shutdowns because that means our overlords are out of the office.