A federal government shutdown looks more likely by the hour, and there's no shortage of explainers on the web about what it all means (Wonkblog is an excellent place to start, as is our rundown from the 2011 shutdown fight). The line between "excepted" (gets to keep working) and "non-excepted" (gets shut down) is drawn on an agency-by-agency basis, and the specific determination is based on the importance of the function and how illegal ceasing to do it might be. But aside from some obvious ones--national parks would be closed; the CO₂ scrubber on the International Space Station would stay plugged in--it'll be agency leadership that makes the determinations. But what will this mean for the federal web?

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