The House is expected to vote – perhaps as early as this afternoon – on the Deficit Reduction and Economic Growth Working Group Act of 2013 (H.R.3273), a bill that would establish a committee of ten House members and ten Senate members charged with making recommendations to resolve the current stalemate over the government shutdown and looming debt ceiling crisis.

While it’s common to equate the federal government with the Washington, D.C. metro area, the federal government provides services all over the country. Because of this, the shutdown’s impact will ripple throughout the country – even before considering the broader economic impacts that would come if it is prolonged.

The ludicrous and wasteful government shutdown can now claim another victim: government transparency. Several functions dedicated to providing information to the American public have been declared “non-essential” and are suspended during the lapse in appropriations. You might say that open government is now closed for business.

Here are some of the ways in which the shutdown is making it harder to know what government is doing (or at least, was doing before the shutdown):

Americans awoke this morning to discover the federal government had shut down.

To explain the impacts of the nation’s first shutdown in more than 17 years, numerous groups have organized fact sheets, reports, and blogs on the shutdown. We’ve compiled the best of these resources below to distill confusion about what the shutdown could mean for you.