At Mother Jones, Kristina Young notes that the government shutdown is wrecking ongoing scientific experiments, including an experiment to determine how desert plants will respond to climate change's higher average temperatures. Without technicians to take the measurements, "the plants are going unmeasured, cutting off the continuous observations necessary for careful science and creating a gap in this long-term data set." And that’s not the half of it.
My own research exploring how nutrients move through desert soils has been impacted. Ongoing work to publish research has been delayed without access to my government collaborators, and decisions about federal fellowships I’ve applied for and am relying on to complete my dissertation research with the University of Texas at El Paso have been put on hold.
Delaying fellowships and scientific research is one thing, but governmental incompetence leading to the direct sabotage of ongoing scientific research is at this point both expected (NASA has had plenty of experience of this, for example) and infuriating. In the case of some of these continuous data-collection efforts, the data gap may necessitate scrapping and restarting experiments entirely. And it's for no reason other than posturing by a group of dullards who couldn't give a damn how many individual injuries they inflict on the nation, as they engage in the latest round of fundraising 'n’ chest-thumping.
If millions of people get thrown off food stamps, you won't find many Republicans complaining about it. Fouling up experiments across the nation designed to calculate just how screwed our crop-growing efforts are going to be when today's infants turn 50 is, if anything, a happy bonus.