Day five of the shutdown is underway and today may be the first day the full impact starts to sink in. The shutdown started over the weekend and Monday/Tuesday many government offices would have been closed for the holiday anyway. Politico reports:
Federal offices were set to re-open Wednesday for normal business, unless they were among the nine departments without government funding. Those include the departments of agriculture, commerce, homeland security, housing and urban development, interior, justice, state, transportation and treasury. NASA and the Food and Drug Administration are among the federal agencies hit by the shutdown as well.
Roughly 400,000 federal employees will be furloughed during the shutdown, with another 400,000 deemed “essential personnel” and required to stay on the job without pay.
The public may also start feeling the impact of the shutdown, especially those that rely on certain government programs. CNN writes:
Eligible households will still receive monthly SNAP benefits for January. But other domestic nutrition assistance programs such as the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, WIC, and the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations will only be operational based on available resources. Additional federal funds and commodities will not be provided during the shutdown.
The USDA has a list of service that will be effected on its website.
During the lapse in government funding, USDA will maintain many of our services for as long as we can, using existing resources. For general info on the shutdown itself, please check your usual news sources. In the meantime, here's the rundown from USDA: https://t.co/jAI9UJDhlg
— Dept. of Agriculture (@USDA) December 26, 2018
Meanwhile, while the Senate will reconvene late Thursday there is still no end in sight. MSNBC writes:
Since the president doesn’t appear to have any kind of strategy whatsoever, that’s a challenge for which there is no clear answer. He’s not only backed himself into a corner, making a demand that will not be met, Trump is also confronting the simple fact that he’s running out of calendar. As weak as his position is now, seven days from tomorrow, there will be a Democratic majority in the House, at which point the president’s prospects will be quite a bit worse.
Trump is going to have to cave. He can do it now or he can do it later, though the longer he drags this out, the more painful it’ll be for the president when he accepts an inevitable defeat.
