US: No consensus over budget between govt, opposition

US government could face huge crisis if the federal budget 2011 does not get approved and things are not settled by tomorrow. As the countdown continues to a possible partial government shutdown, workers whose paychecks depend on the U.S. government are preparing themselves for the worst.In United States, government shutdown means that hundreds of thousands of federal workers could be idled as nonessential, disrupting all but vital US services such as national defence, emergency medical care and air traffic control. In addition, some employees of federal contractors may also be furloughed.National parks and museums could be closed, an estimated 200,000 applications for US passports could go unprocessed and work on more than 3,500 bankruptcy cases could be suspended.US government had to face a similar shutdown in the past (1995 – 1996) during which new patients had not been accepted into clinical research at the National Institutes of Health, hotline calls to NIH about diseases had not been answered, and toxic waste cleanup work at 609 sites had been stopped.