Does this sound like satire? It isn’t. The emphasis below is mine.

Michael Stratford of Inside Higher Ed reports.

Government shutdown curbs academic research at many levels

WASHINGTON — A wide range of academic research across the country, from sophisticated biomedical experiments at the National Institutes of Health to undergraduate political science essays, was being interrupted Wednesday as the federal government shutdown continued for a second day — with no clear path to a resolution.

In addition to forcing the closure of government buildings where research is conducted — such as the Library of Congress and presidential libraries — the shutdown was also cutting off access to myriad electronic resources on which many researchers depend. Websites that were not operational included those of the Library of Congress, the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Science Foundation, the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the Education Department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.

PubMed, a free repository of biomedical and life science research maintained by the National Institutes of Health, was operational but a notice on the site warned users that it would not be updated during the shutdown.

Researchers who had traveled to Washington for the purpose of using federal resources to advance their work said they were frustrated by the shutdown.

Torsten Kathke, a postdoctoral fellow at the German Historical Institute, came here about a month ago to begin research on a comparative project on the state of society in Germany and the United States during the 1970s and 1980s.

He said his work relies heavily on looking at physical records and electronic databases at the Library of Congress, which are inaccessible during the shutdown. Without those resources, he said, for instance, that he cannot access the archives of some small-town newspapers in the United States.