What Happens During a Government Shutdown?

Like the bus in “Speed,” the federal government is barreling toward a shutdown at full throttle. Only instead of a competent Sandra Bullock, it's Donald Trump in the driver's seat ignoring the road ahead while he yells at the Twitter app on his phone.

So what happens if Congress cannot come up with a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government funded? Do all the lights in every government facility get turned off at 12:01 a.m. Saturday morning? Does the military go dark? Do Navy ships shut down their engines and just float along until the government turns the money spigot back on?

Well, no. Ali Velshi had a good, if brief, explainer on MSNBC on Thursday explaining what stops and what doesn't if (when) Congress can't get a CR to the president's desk before he loses patience, reverses direction and flies off to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend.

Government functions are divided into essential and nonessential categories.

The former includes air traffic controllers, federal law enforcement, and, of course, the troops. Veterans hospitals would stay open. Airport security would continue to function. Some federal programs that involve feeding people — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and school lunches, for example — would still be funded.

But the people who perform these functions will not get paid until the shutdown ends. Since the government won't run out of money for three weeks or so, the Treasury can prioritize who gets the last of it. That means military personnel can still get maybe one more paycheck, but nothing after that.

Additionally, there are some programs and agencies that operate independently of the federal budget. The Postal Service is self-funded, so mail still gets delivered. The Social Security Administration is also independent of the budget, so it would still be open to send out checks for the post office to deliver.

Nonessential functions would cease.

Many of the employees of the vast federal bureaucracy would be furloughed with no pay until the shutdown ends, whether it is next week or next year. The IRS would shut down just as tax season is gearing up. Visa and passport processing would stop. Which might make the anti-immigration hardliners in the Trump administration happy, actually.

The National Institute of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would both shut down. The timing for the latter is particularly gruesome, since we're in the middle of a brutal flu season. National parks, unlike in 2013, will actually stay open, but services such as trash collection within those parks would stop.

Basically, the country will continue to function, but there will be consequences for millions of people, from mild inconveniences to serious trouble for any families that rely on a federal paycheck. And the ripple effects of those lost paychecks cannot be understated.

But at least Robert Mueller and his team would keep working, according to CNN.