The shutdown is cutting off data you paid for

Among the casualties of the current government shutdown: Simple access to some key taxpayer-funded government data.

Why it matters: You may not need to look up where America's oldest residents live or how much federal revenue K-12 schools get. • But it's your right as an American taxpayer to get those numbers, if you want them. After all, you paid to collect them. • More than that, government data measures our progress on key issues, drives major business and investment decisions, determines the size of Social Security checks — and gives us a shared, trusted quantitative reality.

Driving the news: Data.census.gov, the easiest-to-use portal for accessing U.S. Census Bureau data, is broken as of Wednesday morning. • "Due to the lapse of federal funding, this website is not being upda