Short-term govt. spending measure still in question; Shutdown looms

Even as Republicans unveiled their 2012 budget plan, negotiations continued and stalled on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers attempt to reach an agreement on current-year spending to avert a government shutdown on Friday.

The Wall Street Journal: Budget Talks Head To The Brink
Republicans and Democrats stumbled one day closer to a government shutdown on Friday, as the two parties escalated what has become a broader battle over Washington's role in the U.S. economy. The two fights — one over funding the government for the next six months, the other over a sweeping plan to reshape the government for decades to come — showed how far apart the two parties are on basic fiscal issues ahead of the 2012 elections (Bendavid, Weisman and Lee, 4/6).

The Fiscal Times: Government Shutdown: 13 Ways It Can Hurt You
Consider some of the impacts of the three-week shutdown back in 1995-1996 — all of which could be repeated this time around: 1. New patients were no longer accepted into clinical research at the National Institutes of Health. In addition, NIH disease hotlines and CDC disease surveillance were stopped. ... 3. Hundreds of thousands of "nonessential" federal workers were furloughed for three weeks, from mid-December 1995 to early January of 1996. (Some of those workers eventually received back pay for their missed days.) (Mackey, 4/5).