Additional context: only one of those shutdowns has involved a significant fraction of the government suspending its operations for more than 5 days.
Before 1980, "shutdowns" followed different rules so that they did not affect government operations nearly as much. Since 1980, every shutdown but one has been 5 days or less. The Clinton-Gingrich shutdown, which began in late 1995, is the only one to last longer (first 5 days, and then 21 more days after a brief truce).
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)