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[quote=Anonymous]The shutdown's impact on the US economy explained:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/18/18188262/government-shutdown-economy-recession-workers-gdp

There are also a bunch of small agencies and federal programs that the average taxpayer is unaware of.  The federal government spends just 14.2% of its total budget on non defense discretionary spending.  A big chunk of that 14.2% goes to bolster national security and ensure law and order (Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice including the FBI, the CIA, State Department, Department of Corrections),  Part of the 14.2% of the federal budget goes to fund many agencies and programs that do research and gather data.  Scientific research for example is just 2% of the total federal budget and many of these programs are impacted (NOAA, FDA, USDA, NASA, NIST, Smithsonian to name a few).

There are also many government agencies and programs that do economic research (Commerce Department, Census, Treasury, USDA, BLS to name just a few).  They work synergistically so although BLS is open they cannot produce all the reports they normally do because they rely on data and analysis from the other agencies that are currently closed.  The Federal Reserve is open but depends on data from all these government agencies to make informed decisions about monetary policy.

We often hear that the most valuable commodity in our modern capitalist economy is data and no organization in the world produces and analyzes as much good data as the US government.  We have a veritable brain trust of Ph.D scientists and Ph.D economists who gather and analyze incredible amounts of quality information.  It is what farmers use to decide how much to plant and when to sell their crops, it is what our 401k managers use to decide what to buy and sell, it is what companies use to decide whether to expand, and how much to produce and how to plan for the future.  Right now the eyes and ears all these private sector actors rely on are offline and the costs will be real over the next year as decisions are made on the basis of bad or incomplete information.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-shutdown-data-explainer/explainer-u-s-government-shutdown-leaves-data-vacuum-in-its-wake-idUSKCN1PG2UI

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/20/687045376/lack-of-data-processing-during-government-shutdown-compounds-economic-effects

The impact on scientific data collection and scientific research is also going to have long term effects.  This is an excellent article which describes the short and long term impact on scientific research

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-record-breaking-government-shutdown-disrupting-science[/quote]

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