The government shutdown may be over, but its effects will be felt in next year's tax season. The IRS has announced that it will be delaying the date when it will start accepting tax returns by about two weeks. The 2014 season will start sometime between January 28th and February 4th, a week or two later than its original date of January 21st. The agency says this is because the shutdown - during which about 90 percent of the IRS was inoperational - put its QA operations three weeks behind. "Programming, testing and deployment of more than 50 IRS systems is needed to handle processing of nearly 150 million tax returns," reads the statement. " …

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have agreed on a plan to reopen the federal government after two weeks of shutdown. The shutdown took effect on October 1st, after Congress failed to agree on a budget because of Republican opposition to Obama's Affordable Care Act. As part of the compromise, the US budget will be extended through January 14th, 2014, and the debt limit will be suspended until February 7th - once again punting an issue Congress has been debating for years. A committee will look at more expansive plans for a budget later this year, with a report due December 13th. The ACA its …

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At the close of business today, more than 90 percent of the staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will go home on furlough as a result of the government shutdown. The Commission had been operating on carryover funds since last Monday, when the shutdown began, but those funds run out today, reducing the staff to a skeleton crew of 300 "essential" personnel who will be responsible for monitoring the nation's 63 nuclear sites until the government reopens.

Those 300 employees do include resident inspectors who work on-site at the various plants, as well as a skeleton crew of managers in the central headquarters. More employees can be recal …

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Researchers looking for information in the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institute, or the National Archives have been out of luck since last week when the US government shut down amid a lapse in funding, but now Oxford University Press is hoping that it can offer them a valuable alternative. Through the end of next week, the press is offering free access to three of its online resources: Oxford Reference (which includes a collection of the press' core academic books), American National Biography Online (which includes biographical details on over 18,700 famous names from US history), and Social Explorer (which includes access to past …

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Federal Judge Richard Kopf agrees with the Urban Dictionary definition of the word batshit: "a level of insanity that the word alone cannot justify," and believes that forcing further staff cuts would mean Congress has reached that level of insanity. He took to his blog to admonish Congress for the government shutdown, which has forced organizations to temporarily let go of "non-essential" employees. According to the judge, the sequester has already left the judiciary shorthanded, and every remaining employee of the branch should be considered an essential employee. Saying what many Americans are thinking, Judge Kopf urged readers to tell Co …

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The White House panel tasked with reviewing the state of US intelligence operations has been stalled by the government shutdown, Politico reports. According to internal sources, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper decided on Friday to furlough the panel's staff, freezing the five members' funds to travel to Washington. While they can continue to discuss the issues, the lack of funding and general state of government affairs means their work is effectively frozen for the near future.

Even before the freeze, the shutdown had already put the panel on shaky grounds. Early last week, panel member and former CIA director Michael Morel …

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US President Barack Obama gave an extended sit-down interview to the Associated Press on Friday evening, in which he covered a broad range of topics of national and global concern, including Iran's nuclear ambitions, the historic shutdown of the US federal government - now in its fifth day, and the controversy over the Washington Redskins NFL team's team, a pejorative term for Native Americans.

Noticeably absent from the conversation though, was any discussion of the growing controversy over the NSA's secretive mass online surveillance apparatus. The AP's reporter didn't ask, and President Obama didn't volunteer any opinions or information …

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