From the linked article:
if the NSF misses one or two weekly payments to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, the facility would be forced to close, disrupting long-term research, says facility director Tony Beasley.
also
At NASA, one casualty could be the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, which until 1 October was being prepared at Cape Canaveral in Florida for an 18 November launch. MAVEN’s principal investigator, Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado Boulder, says that his team can accommodate a brief work stoppage. But if MAVEN, which will study the Martian atmosphere, misses its three-week launch window, it will be delayed until 2016,
(A 3 year wait for something that was going to launch next month probably means wasted resources. There's also a chance that it becomes a sunk cost as better tech. comes by.)
the FDA has put 45% of its staff on leave and will cut back on food-safety programmes
Given the number of programs being effected, I think it's really unlikely that no projects will be shut down anywhere because of this.
I'm more worried about biology experiments-- some of them need constant maintenance. Do you know whether the folks who are feeding the animals and such are still doing so?
For those who haven't heard, NIH and NSF are no longer processing grants, leading to many negative downstream effects.
I've been directing my attention elsewhere lately and don't have anything informative to say about this. However, my uninformed intuition is that people who care about effective altruism (research in general, infrastructure development, X-risk mitigation, life-extension...basically everything, actually) or have transhumanist leanings should be very concerned.
The consequences have already been pretty disastrous. To provide just one, immediate example, the article says that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has shut down. I think that this is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths. Each additional day that this continues could have huge negative impact down the line, perhaps delaying some key future discoveries by years. This event *might* be a small window of opportunity to prevent a lot of harm very cheaply.
So the question is:
1) Can we do anything to remedy the situation?
2) If so, is it worth doing it? (Opportunity costs, etc)