Even granting that our hypothetical scientist is willing to take the risk of being admonished for working during shutdown
This doesn't seem to be that severe a grant. People go into science because they like it, not because it pays well.- for many, thoughts fields about one's subject can border on the intrusive. And as long as they come back and don't say explicitly that their new ideas were from when they were on leave, they'll be fine.
what exactly are they going to do without institutional support? No journal access, no computing resources, no facilities? Navel gazing only gets one so far.
So, they can read papers they already have. They can get journal access from friends at universities. They can do computing that doesn't involve as large a scale. They can think about data they got that doesn't seem to make sense. I agree there are limits but those limits seem not that restrictive as long as the shutdown doesn't last for that long.
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)