Although federal employees forced to furlough will feel a near immediate impact of the government shutdown, other impacts may take longer to ripple through before they affect daily life.
That said, anyone who has tried to visit a number of government websites since Tuesday at midnight may have been confronted with a more immediate impact: they can't be accessed.
As you might imagine, this makes reporting on healthcare quite difficult. Check out the image I was greeted with after a visit to the FTC website in hopes of accessing the agency's statement on a recent antitrust case:
PubMed.gov, a database of medical journal articles operated by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, is open but "it is being maintained with minimal staffing due to the lapse in government funding."
Also closed are Census.gov, USDA.gov and the Library of Congress' website, all of which are accessed routinely by our reporters.
HHS' sites are is still up and running due to largely to the agency's commitment to keep its healthcare.gov live during the critical start to healthcare exchanges' open enrollment period. Websites for the CDC, NIH and AHRQ can be accessed but aren't being updated.
What does this mean for us? Less guidance and statistics to share with you, our readers.
And while shutdown does change how we report, it also will impact other job functions and employers just as much, if not more.
Take for example the complete shutdown of the government's e-verify website to confirm worker eligibility. Talk about a difficult challenge for a hospital's HR department. Will employers wait to bring on new workers until they can be verified? Or will the risk hiring an ineligible worker? Which is worse?
How has the shutdown impacted you and your business? I'd love to hear how its impacted you and your organization through the comment section below.