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Government shutdown 101: 12 ways it could affect you

With Congress failing to fund the federal government by Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year, the government has gone into partial shutdown. Here is a list of what's open, and what isn't, during the shutdown.

2. Will Social Security and Medicare payments still be mailed?

Patrick Semansky/AP/File
This file photo shows the Social Security Administration's main campus in Woodlawn, Md.

Yes, but.... Social Security and Medicare are entitlements, and as such, the spending is mandatory. So checks will still go out. But there could be delays if a lack of funds for worker salaries means a reduced workforce at their respective agencies. Also, new applications are not likely to be processed until the government reopens. In the 1996 shutdown, more than 10,000 Medicare applicants were turned away daily, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB).  

During the shutdowns of 1995 and 1996, some Social Security employees were allowed to work, which kept benefits flowing to existing Social Security, disability, and black lung beneficiaries, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS). But over time, more workers were brought back to process new claims and respond to other requests (such as from people who needed a Social Security card to work).

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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