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The Centers for Disease Control said it would see “significant impact” to its operations as a result of the shutdown, and government employees feared the long-term effects on their income with no end in sight.

The shutdown was expected to have sweeping effects across the nation as hundreds of thousands of federal employees faced indefinite furloughs, tourist destinations shut down and services including food assistance and IRS audits are disrupted. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which collects employment numbers, said on its website that it would not “collect data, issue reports, or respond to public inquiries” for the length of the shutdown.

Barricades were set to go up around the National Mall, NBC Washington reported.

“We have 3,000 permitted events on the Mall every year,” Carol Johnson with the National Park Service told the station. “While the government is shut down, all of those events have to be canceled,” she said, including an “honor flight” Tuesday of veterans from Mississippi.

A number of District restaurants and at least one Pilates studio is offering free or discounted services to furloughed federal employees for as long as the shutdown lasts, NBC Washington reported.

“It’s a mess, Congress needs to get their act together. Seriously, they’re like kids on the playground, fighting, fighting for nothing. It’s ridiculous,” said Leathey Chandler, an employee at the Department of Agriculture. “It was ridiculous then and it’s ridiculous now. Get it together, people.”

Another USDA employee, Lawrence Albert, said he was going into work to set up an email away message and change his voicemail before heading home.

“I think it’s miserable, it has nothing to do with democracy or lobbying for causes,” Albert said. “This is not the way government should work at all, it’s a disgrace.”

Employees feared furloughs at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state on Tuesday, where 16,000 civilians work, according to Seattle NBC News affiliate King 5. The base released a statement on Monday saying that civilian employees should report to work on Tuesday, but did not say who would be considered essential enough to stay on.

The CDC would completely close the “vast majority” of its operations, it announced in a release on Tuesday morning. The shutdown would lead to a slower response to public health issues, and its activity monitoring diseases, including flu season, will be severely slashed.

Tourist destinations in New England braced for the full impact of the shutdown, darkening the Fanueil Hall Visitor Center in Boston and closing down Acadia National Park in Maine, according to the Boston Globe.

“It’s going to be a kind of ripple effect,” Sean Hennessey, spokesman for the National Park Service, told the newspaper. “There’s a significant economic impact that our national parks have in their communities.”

Ohio resident Maureen Brown told local affiliate NBC 4 that she was worried about the effect that shutdown would have on government workers in her area. Brown, herself a former government employee, told the affiliate. “If they don’t work then they don’t go shopping, they don’t buy a house and that affects everybody and it makes the economy worse than it is.”

Many others said that even a short-term furlough could cut deep into their finances, including 23-year-old park ranger Darquez Smith.

“I’ve got a lot on my plate right now – tuition, my daughter, bills,” Smith, a ranger at Ohio’s Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, told the Associated Press. “I’m just confused and waiting just like everyone else.”

Department of Veterans Affairs employee Marc Cevasco told the AP he was going to work on Tuesday, but planned to be furlough indefinitely after that.

“Even if it’s just shut down for a week, that’s a quarter of your pay this month. That means a lot to a lot of people,” Cevasco, 30, told the news service. Just a few excerpts from http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/01/20771011-sorry-were-closed-
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The Republican-led House of Representatives insisted on delaying President Barack Obama's healthcare reform - dubbed Obamacare - as a condition for passing a bill.

More than 700,000 federal employees face unpaid leave with no guarantee of back pay once the deadlock is over.

It is the first shutdown in 17 years and the dollar fell early on Tuesday.

Goldman Sachs estimates a three-week shutdown could shave as much as 0.9% from US GDP this quarter.

The BBC's Mark Mardell in Washington says the divide in US politics has grown so bitter that government itself cannot function. Democrats were never likely to make concessions on healthcare reform. But Republicans have made demands that they knew would not be met rather than be accused of weakness and betrayal by their own hardliners, he adds.

Major portions of the healthcare law, which passed in 2010 and has been validated by the US Supreme Court, took effect on Tuesday regardless of whether there is a shutdown.

The US government has not undergone a shutdown since 1995-96, when services were suspended for a record 21 days.

Republicans demanded then-President Bill Clinton agree to their version of a balanced budget.

As lawmakers grappled with the latest shutdown, the 17 October deadline for extending the government's borrowing limit looms even larger.

House Republicans have also demanded a series of policy concessions - including on the president's health law and on financial and environmental regulations - in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.

Guy Crundwell from Connecticut told the BBC that politicians should be solving the country's problems rather than engaging in a "charade".

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