About 420,000 U.S. employees have been classified as essential and are working without pay.

“The longer it lasts, the harder it’s going to be on myself and many, many others,” one contractor told us.

We’re now five days into the partial government shutdown. While the Senate is expected to reconvene Thursday and resume negotiations over how to end the shutdown, odds are that it’ll continue into January. The impasse is already cutting into the supply of something that is essential to just about every market out there: federal economic data. […]

The economic effects have been largely obscured by the holidays, but will start showing up soon.

Christmas marked the fourth day of the partial U.S. government shutdown with no end in sight.

“The shutdown hopefully will not last long,” said President Trump.

A bipartisan committee has spent nearly a year trying to come up with a better way to do things