In a somewhat related vein, a bunch of people here at work are pretty anxious/pissed about the shutdown now. Since we have a ton of collaborations with the NIH labs and CDC labs, both of which are closed, a lot of experiments are on the brink of being ruined.

Since collecting samples and vaccinations and all kinds of things typically have to be done at very specific times over the course of month/year long experiments, missing those timepoints can be catastrophic. So right now we're supposed to be getting samples from a study being done at the NIH, their timepoint is Friday. Now its reasonable to do the timpoint on Monday, Tuesday is a stretch, and every day after that makes the data less usable and relevant. This one study was started back in March has so far cost about $150,000, which is not a ton of money in the world of research science. But we're just one collaborator of the NIH and CDC, multiply that across many hundreds, maybe thousands of projects that could be impacted by screwing up timepoints these past two weeks and that's a lot of money and a lot of private and non-profit institutions out there getting a bit of the shaft.

Not that the type of congressmen who are involved in the whole affair would likely give two hoots about all of the research they're negatively impacting since we are probably viewed as some kind of unnecessary waste of money and immoral to boot.