On October 1st the government had a little set back because of a sudden shut down due to Congress not being able to compromise on the Health Care issue. However, the entire government is not shut down. Only the federal government is shut down, and only certain groups in the federal government are being shut down.

To get more in depth, the House of Representatives is mostly comprised of more than 50% Republicans, while the Senate is more than 50% Democrats, and we all know that President Obama is a Democrat. What happened was that the President told Congress that even if they denied the bill he was going to veto it and it was going to happen again and again.

The Tea Party is a collective group of about 40 Republicans in the house. They are a very powerful group that does not settle with compromise at all. The other republicans in the house wanted to compromise with the new healthcare plan, but the Tea Party wanted to have exactly what they wanted. The fault of this issue that the government is closing is due to the fact that the Republicans are so afraid of the Tea Party that they side with them instead of taking a stand against them and compromising with the Democrats.

With the government closing many agencies have shut down, but not all. The ones that stay open are anything dealing with National Security, Public Safety, or programs that are written into Permanent Law (Social Security).

The ones that do close however are things like Health.

“The National Institutes of Health will stop accepting new patients for clinical research and stop answering hotline calls about medical questions.” According to the Washington Post, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will stop its seasonal flu program and have a ‘significantly reduced capacity to respond to outbreak investigations’.”

Also the Department of Housing and Urban Development will be shut down, The Department of Homeland Security cannot check the immigration status of new employees. Law Enforcement being shut down means that the Justice Department will suspend cases until government resumes. Parks and museums have been closed including Yosemite,  The Statue of Liberty and 400 others. Visas and passport agencies are trying to stay open but some of the activities may be interrupted.

If the shutdown continues for a few weeks then the District of Columbia will shut down all except for its most essential services. The government estimated that 800,000 federal workers will be sent home; that leaves about 1.3 million workers left and 1.4 million active military members.

The federal workers are still getting paid however, which is a terrible thing.

“I think the house and Senate should not get paid during the shutdown, because it would help motivate them to resolve the problem faster,” said senior Jake Siry.