Some non-park things that are shut down
When I posted on the government shutdown last week, I grabbed a photo from the closed-down Statue of Liberty. It was an enticing editorial choice: Give me your tired, your poor, your furloughed federal employees yearning to just do their damn jobs again. But it was also probably an unhelpful choice. Mike Konzcal’s post includes a similar photo, but as an illustration of how not to understand the shutdown:
The stories dominating the headlines are about national park closings and zoo cameras going offline, giving the sense that the "non-essential" parts of government are simply about facilitating leisure and vacations. And, like looking into the wrong end of a telescope, the stories of individual people and programs put on furlough doesn’t communicate to the public what kind of overall functions are being abandoned by the state during the shutdown.
In short: even though the Pentagon employees are back at work, even though the Obamacare exchanges are held back only by the weight of bad web development, this shutdown is causing problems much deeper than spoiled national-park trips. Via Konzcal and elsewhere, here are just some of the ways:
