[dsfyu404ed]

>And taking the thing down for 12 hours, 1/4 of every weekend could possibly be good in what way?

Some stakeholder somewhere probably refuses to go down during the business week for whatever reason. Maybe that stakeholder isn't even in government. Stuff like this is not uncommon in the world of enterprise.

[bjtitus]

And why was this new weekly downtime not present during previous years?

When you combine this with calls by Trump to refuse to pay insurance companies (see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-healthcare-trump/trum...), it sure looks malicious.

[searine]

I am usually the first to quote Hanlon's razor and attribute something like this to incompetence, but in this case it really hard not to see the malice in the actions taken.