How many “essential” federal employees does it take to hang a sign?

Yeah… I know… I know…   [Federal Guideline Handbook – Chapter 16, Volume 9; Subsection xvii, paragraph #3a: “Determining Human Resource Allocation” – In order to determine appropriate efficiency metrics’, unless otherwise noted, all federal employees shall, at the request of their immediate level 3 supervisors, while under the direction of the management office, require a specific measurement of the sign prior to labor distribution consideration.  ∞Prior to facilitating any request from alternate office management the proposed sign hanging must meet AFSCME guideline 334.021 article iii – and must be accompanied by a proposal, filed in triplicate, to include such measurements in metric centimeters, and standard inches, and allow a 10 business day review and approval request.  Failing to appropriately follow specific guidelines may lead to disciplinary action up to, and possibly including, the elimination of one 30-minute rest period for any individual workday exceeding 2.25,  but not greater than 3.15 hours, in duration]

Meanwhile….  83% of The Federal Government is NOT involved in the shutdown – Everyone knows the phrase “government shutdown” doesn’t mean the entire U.S. government is shut down. So in a partial government shutdown, like the one underway at the moment, how much of the government is actually shut down, and how much is not?
One way to measure that is in how much money the government spends. In a conversation Thursday, a Republican member of Congress mentioned that the military pay act, passed by Congress and signed by President Obama at the beginning of the shutdown, is actually a huge percentage of the government’s discretionary spending in any given year. And that is still flowing. So if you took that money, and added it to all the entitlement spending that is unaffected by a shutdown, plus all the areas of spending that are exempted from a shutdown, and added it all together, how much of the federal government’s total spending is still underway even though the government is technically shut down?
I asked a Republican source on the Senate Budget Committee for an estimate. This was the answer: “Based on estimates drawn from CBO and OMB data, 83 percent of government operations will continue. This figure assumes that the government pays amounts due on appropriations obligated before the shutdown ($512 billion), spends $225 billion on exempted military and civilian personnel, pays entitlement benefits for those found eligible before the shutdown (about $2 trillion), and pays interest costs when due ($237 billion). This is about 83 percent of projected 2014 spending of $3.6 trillion.”  (read more)