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Civil Service employees are non-elected, public sector employees of the federal government. I am not sure how civil service employees can really be "self serving" - they do not set policy - they simply implement policy legislated by politicians. Running off civil servants after five years because of morally corrupt career politicians doesn't seem like it would have an overall positive impact on the USA.
If you think the troops are inundated with paper work now, start running off the General Schedule employees after five years and watch how fast the systems grinds to a crawl.

-You say you want more slots to a specialty school? Too bad - the new ATRRS guy doesn't understand the system well enough to get you into the next class and the last guy just hit 61 months.
-Institutional knowledge would be a thing of the past - consider what 18C MOS training might be like if SWC would have been forced to release Ernie Tabata way back in 1989.

General Schedule employees don't really have much power on a national scale - they can certainly serve as speed bumps to progress in some cases, but they hardly get to implement any type of policy without tons of oversight.

Senior Executive Service employees may deserve some scrutiny as career bureaucrats since they are operating at the same level as General Officers, but they also have cabinet level bosses that give them their marching orders. (It doesn't help that as many as 10% of the SES could be made up of political appointees.)

A non-essential employee might be the one that is staffing the paper work for a detailed off post training event that is set to occur in April - but if that paper work don't make its way through the system before the suspense date because the GS employee was furloughed - your training isn't going to happen on time.

The fact that "essential" programs continue to function during a furlough is smoke and mirrors cultivated by politicians that use the event as political leverage.

The truth is, for every citizen that thinks the civil service employees are concubines for the political class, there is a politician that hates the civil service for their perceived disloyalty. The poor old GS guy is stuck in the middle, doing the best they can despite being reviled as the toad in the road.

As an instructor at the MFF, I realized that we would be in a huge hurt if civil servants were only glorified part time employees. Rigging and Life Support maintenance would be a fucking disaster if we had to hire a new SME every few years. Working as a Staff NCO at USASOC, I came to the realization that most of the real paperwork gets done by GS workers because a green-suiter rarely does it right the first time.

It isn't the civil servants shutting down government, it is PETTY partisan politics.
Meanwhile these motherfuckers collect all of their pay and allowances on time, and spend their taxpayer funded three-martini-lunches planning the next golf trip.

Lets just make sure we are hating on the right people.



...just my two cents, I could be wrong