What do the non-essential government employees do?

I was one of the non essential government employees furloughed in 1995. Let me share what I did and you judge whether it was worth doing.

I worked to implement programs that the Congress mandated. When the Congress appropriates money for a program, the executive branch is legally bound to implement that program. Indeed, the executive branch can not legally implement programs for which the legislative branch does not allocate funds.

The programs that I worked on funded research as part of the U.S. development assistance program. Some of our programs:

• Recognizing that pneumonia killed huge numbers of children in developing countries, we funded a number of projects around the world to find out what diseases were actually causing those diseases and killing the kids. A number of U.S. scientists collaborated in the program donating their time. The results clarified those causes and were used by the World Health Organization in redefining the guidelines for treatment of childhood pneumonia. Those guidelines are used around the world.
• A small grant was used to bring a researcher to a U.S. lab and led to the first fast diagnostic test for Lyme Disease.
• A research project showed a previously unrecognized but huge problem with Hepatitis C in Egypt. This was part of project that the Congress chartered to promote scientific cooperation between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The Congress felt, and I agree, that scientific cooperation helps to build ties across borders, and thus this project helped make the peace process work better. It also helped deal with a huge health problem in Egypt.
• A small project enabled the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology pioneer in research on carbon based transistors. The Congress had passed a budget to help Russian scientists after the fall of Soviet Communism. NIST applied for a travel grant to bring a Russian scientists to its U.S. labs. That scientist had developed transistors on a carbon base in his Russian lab and published, but others had been unable to replicate the research, and his results were doubted. The scientist was able to replicate the results in the NIST lab. Carbon based transistors, if they can be produced commercially, should be faster than silicon based ones in use today.
• One of our grantees demonstrated that sugar cane varieties could be grown with symbiotes in their stems and leaves that fixed nitrogen from the air and made it available to the plant. Last I heard, one-third of Brazil's sugar cane was grown without nitrogen fertilizer using the fruits of this research. One impact was that it became less expensive to grow sugar cane, leading to lower cost biofuel for Brazil's fleet of cars, leading to less air pollution. Perhaps more important, the research identified a new approach to biological nitrogen fixation that might be used in other "grasses" such as corn.
• In one of the rare "capacity building" projects we funded, we provided a $150,000 grant to the universities in Costa Rica to build an Internet backbone. That backbone was linked to the United States using unused capacity of a NASA satellite. It was quickly sued as the base of a country wide Internet network, which was then extended through Central America.

I left government shortly after being furloughed in 1995, so my memory of advances based on our program is out of date. We funded hundreds, if not thousands of small projects, and I have only given results of a very few of them. That our work was deemed non essential did not mean that it was without value.