Because most politics is instead political theater, the government has made a show of canceling White House tours and Easter egg hunts and told airline travelers to expect longer lines. The White House calligraphy staff has managed to write along just fine, though.
And science is continuing to move also. Despite claims that sequestration would harm projects, in reality it has little to do with project funding (outside the political theater of writing grant applicants and telling them sequestration hurts their chances - vote Democrat), as this NSF study on duck penises getting approved shows.
Now, reproduction is important, as are shrimp on treadmills. People who think spending $6 billion on one Navy destroyer is a good idea will still balk at $350K for duck penises but that is not an outrageous grant. Still funny to read about when the government is claiming we will run out of meat if those mean Republicans don't agree to do whatever the president wants.
We should do what California did. Change the constitution so it only takes a majority vote to pass laws, then redistrict so the 36% of the state not Democrats are jammed into 20% of the Congressional districts. Then tell Republicans how they must change if they want to get elected.
Here is a synopsis of the rather reasonable-sounding project.
Preliminary results of the project, suggest that male competition plays an important role in the evolution of waterfowl reproductive morphology, that male reproductive morphology is plastic depending on age
