This week’s US data docket would be light even if government reports weren’t suspended for the shutdown, which is to say traders won’t be missing much if the funding lapse drags on.

There was scant evidence early Sunday to suggest the standoff in D.C. was any closer to being resolved, and headlines from Donald Trump’s America were in places surreal.

The administration’s sending hundreds of National Guard troops to Chicago, ostensibly to “protect” an immigration processing center where federal agents scuffled with locals protesting Kristi Noem’s presence at the facility. Tear gas and pepper balls were deployed by the agents against the crowd before Chicago police eventually showed up to separate the two sides.

JB Pritzker doesn’t want the troops and says they aren’t necessary. “State, county and local law enforcement have been working together and coordinating to ensure public safety,” he said. In another incident, a Chicago woman was shot by government agents in what the administration called a “ramming” incident with a law enforcement vehicle. Apparently, she was armed.

In Oregon, a federal judge issued a restraining order against Trump to prevent the deployment of 200 National Guard troops to Portland, where protestors regularly gather around an ICE facility. An attorney for the state described the administration’s determination to station soldiers in the city as “one of the most dramatic infringements on state sovereignty in Oregon’s history” — an intolerable affront to the principles of federalism if ever there was one. The judge in the case, who was appointed by Trump, agreed that the administration’s plans weren’t likely “conceived in good faith.”

This isn’t going to stop and in the event the administration ultimately succeeds (by way of higher court rulings) in deploying more soldiers to more cities, the odds rise that a tense moment results in National Guard troops shooting protestors. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest Trump’s hoping for just such an outcome. Certainly, he’s making it more likely.

Chaos and lawlessness are undesirable, but putting actual troops in close proximity to an irritable populace is a dangerous thing, and the optics are very bad for democracy. In the simplest terms: Domestic law enforcement isn’t the purview of the military.

Meanwhile, every day that passes without a resolution to the shutdown is another day closer to Russ Vought’s layoffs. By Trump’s own account, The White House and the OMB spent a fair amount of time last week combing through “Democrat things” to determine who and what might be cut permanently.

Last week, government employees who accepted the terms of the administration’s “deferred resignation program” instituted during the initial, Elon Musk-assisted purge of the bureaucracy fell off federal payrolls resulting in some 100,000 resignations. Now Trump’s tapping Vought to pick and choose who among three quarters of a million Americans furloughed in the shutdown should be let go permanently, which is to say not rehired when the funding gap’s resolved.

Although the vast majority of furloughed workers will obviously be brought back, firing even a fraction of them would mean thousands of lost jobs. Eventually, you’d expect some of these actions to show up in jobless claims and ultimately in the monthly jobs report, which was of course suspended along with the rest of the government macro data last week.

Researchers at UVA, Emory and Stanford suggested in August that furloughed federal workers are about a third more likely to quit their government jobs during or following a shutdown. “[T]he costs of government shutdowns exceed their direct costs that are often the focus of policymakers,” they wrote. “Shutdowns cause high skill employees to leave public service, this lost workforce is not replenished and the cost of hiring outside contractors as well as lost output far exceeds any savings from lower payroll costs.”

This is just about the last thing the US labor market needs at a time when private sector employers are trimming payrolls and hiring plans are the slowest since the financial crisis.

Consider also that the shutdown may introduce procedural complications around payouts for recently-“retired” government employees. In a piece published over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal described the plight of a former USDA employee who “started a career coaching business for fellow federal workers” but who’s now “worried that her pension will be delayed by the shutdown.” Her solution: “She took a bartending class and signed up to potentially walk dogs on Rover just in case.”

Coming full circle, the only tradable macro events on the calendar this week in the US are the release of the September FOMC minutes and the preliminary read on University of Michigan sentiment for October. “Every day that passes without a reopening deal increases the potential negative ramifications for the real economy,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen remarked.

“Interpreting the news flow is further complicated by the fact that Trump has signaled the possibility that the federal government doesn’t rehire all the furloughed workers,” Lyngen went on, in the same note. “A partial rehiring would be unprecedented and likely lead to a fresh round of legal challenges, although that hasn’t prevented many of the administration’s more dramatic actions thus far.”