The United States economy will be seriously hurt if the US Federal Government remained in a shutdown following a bitter dispute in the country’s Senate over immigration and border security.
The US government officially shut down at midnight on Friday, after Democrats and Republicans blocked a House-passed bill to fund the government. 
In a dramatic late-night session, senators blocked a bill to extend government funding through February 16. The bill needed 60 votes in the 100-member Senate, but fell short with only 50 supporting it.
Most Democrats opposed the bill because their efforts to include protections for hundreds of thousands for the young immigrants known as “Dreamers” failed.
According to an estimate, a short-term closure of the US Federal Government could erase nearly $25bn in economic activity from the world’s largest economy and trim the nation’s gross domestic product by 0.4%.
This is because at least 800,000 federal employees would be “furloughed” without pay, at least until the crisis is resolved, which would likely curtail driving, shopping, dining out and otherwise engaging in the kind of consumer spending that fuels growth.
Until a funding deal is worked out, scores of federal agencies across the country will be unable to operate, and hundreds of thousands of “non-essential” federal workers will be put on temporary unpaid leave.
As the January 19 midnight deadline passed, senators kept haggling over whether a funding extension shorter than the four-weeks passed by the house might provide a bridge for negotiations.
With lawmakers unable to reach an agreement on funding, agencies set in motion a partial shutdown, one year from the day President Donald Trump was inaugurated.
The White House and federal agencies spent Friday mapping out how to proceed if the deadline passed without an agreement, a Bloomberg dispatch showed. Some departments revived shutdown plans from the Obama years. The administration wanted as little disruption as possible. 
For instance, mail will continue to be delivered; airport control towers will be staffed; and the Interior Department hopes to keep the national parks open.
A longer shutdown could have “another nasty surprise” for taxpayers, CBS News reported.
“If a shutdown were to begin now and goes on for longer than 10 days, it would also prevent the processing of tax refunds by the IRS, which would otherwise be filed beginning in late January, with payments scheduled to go out from mid-February onwards,” Capital Economics said in a research note.
Federal parks and other services could also be shuttered, if not immediately, so there would be no revenue from these operations. Then there’s the costly problem of shutting down operations, which could take days for some government departments, along with the cost and time to restart them.
A bigger problem would be if key federal agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) were eventually forced to send workers home. 
What impact the US government shutdown will have on global economies in an increasingly inter-connected world remains to be seen.