The federal government shut down on Tuesday and will stay closed until Congress can reach an agreement on how to fund day-to-day operations. So who gets hurt most by the shutdown?

Everyone's heard that the panda cam at the National Zoo has powered down, but that's hardly the most serious consequence of a shutdown. The biggest disruptions are less visible — the workers going without pay, the patients turned away from research clinics, and so on. Here's a rough list:

1) More than 2 million federal workers will see their paychecks delayed — and 800,000 of them might never get repaid.

This is, by a fair margin, the biggest immediate consequence of a shutdown. So long as Congress keeps the government closed, many federal workers simply won't get paid during the shutdown (save for those in agencies with independent funding, like Postal Service employees).

There are two classes of federal workers to consider. First, there are the 1.3 million "essential" civilian employees who keep working during the shutdown. These workersmay see their paychecks delayed, but they'll eventually get paid once the government reopens.

It's a different story for the 800,000 or so workers deemed "non-essential." These employees have to come in for a few hours on Tuesday, get their files in order, and then go home without compensation, indefinitely. And it's unclear if they'll ever receive back pay. That's completely up to Congress. Non-essential workers did get paid retroactively after the 21-day 1995-'96 shutdown. But this time around, some conservative are reportedly skeptical at the idea of paying federal employees for "work they didn't do."

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