While health care uncertainty roils Washington, the rest of thecountry is coasting toward Obamacare season.

Open enrollment is just about a month away. But the currentlandscape is marked by funding cuts and other White House efforts to pull back on Affordable Care Act outreach, which has led somepeople to brace for what they foresee as the toughest seasonyet.

Related: Healthcare.gov announces series of maintenanceshutdowns

And the latest wrinkle? In states that use the federalmarketplace, healthcare.gov, many navigators — nonprofit groups andworkers who receive federal funding to help consumers enroll — arehitting snags completing a mandatory certification course. Thosecredentials are required before they can formally advise consumersor organize educational events about getting coverage.

To be sure, the training — which involves buggy,not-so-user-friendly software — has never been a smoothprocess.

But this year, many say they’re experiencing more technicalglitches and — in a critical shift — getting less help from the Centers for Medicare& Medicaid Services, the federal agency tasked with supportingthem.

“It used to be … you got the impression they were trying to helpyou,” said Randal Serr, director of Take Care Utah, a navigatororganization based in Salt Lake City. “Now it seems, passively,this is not their priority.” He reports that he has experiencedfirsthand the slow responses to these technical difficulties.

CMS did not provide comment for this story.

Chief among the complaints are repeated error messages and lostor unsaved work after sections of the training are completed.

Based on interviews with navigators as well as advocates andexperts who work with their organizations, when these problemsarise, they compound an already uphill climb to sign people up forACA health coverage.

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Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit health newsroom whosestories appear in news outlets nationwide, is an editoriallyindependent part of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“I don’t know how much icing we need on this cake, but it’s moreicing on the cake,” said Shelli Quenga, director of programs forthe Palmetto Project in South Carolina, whose federal grant was cutby more than 50 percent.

Software problems are occurring more frequently than in the pastat her organization, Quenga said. Meanwhile, she added, it can takeweeks before CMS resolves the issue — a delay she didn’t recallexperiencing in previous years. On top of the funding cuts andadministration’s messages that undermine enrollment, it’s “a newcircle of Dante’s hell,” she said.

But even as navigators from a number of states report problems,others say their experiences haven’t differed from other years.

Adam VanSpankeren, a Wisconsin-based navigator, said he faced afew bugs in completing his training, but nothing unusual. When hesought technical support, he added, he received quick and thoroughhelp. Amalia Benvenutti, a Georgia-based insurer, reported asimilar encounter.

“There has always been the occasional odd bug with a particularmodule not saving or the site crashing — the interface is a bitclunky — but nothing that I would describe as more restrictive oronerous than previous years,” VanSpankeren said.

Daniel Bouton, who organizes the marketplace program at aDallas-based navigator group and has already experienced some ofthese problems, sees a larger pattern. He worries that will almostcertainly affect how many consumers can both access informationabout their insurance options and how many actually getcovered.

Together, these challenges underscore the impact of the Trumpadministration’s broader disinterest in maintaining much ofObamacare’s vast apparatus.

“Local organizations are feeling the cut on funding. Then youmove to, ‘OK, I’m not going to have enough funds for a strongmarketing campaign. I’ll utilize my navigators, and go back tograss roots, and do door-to-door marketing.’ But then you go backto, ‘I can’t send my navigators out because they’re notcertified,’” Bouton said. “I have this feeling of having our handstied.”

And there are other potential delays. Many navigator groups sawtheir federal funding cut this year — a change that required themto submit new working budget proposals to CMS by last Wednesday.It’s unclear if or when they will receive federal approval, whichsome said could further cut into planning and outreach efforts.

Meanwhile, these challenges come as open enrollment — whichstarts Nov. 1 — for the first time lasts only six weeks comparedwith three months in previous seasons. CMS also indicated it will for the first time be shutting downthe healthcare.gov website on most Sundays of open enrollment,which officials say is for maintenance. Sundays, though, havetypically been a prime time for consumers to sign up.

And at the same time, the learning curve is steeper. Manyconsumers aren’t aware that the enrollment period is shorter,Quenga said. Because of congressional back-and-forth, she added,some aren’t even sure if Obamacare is still in effect.

“People need that in-person assistance to understand thesubtleties and nuances of a very complicated system,” she said.“You’re cutting these people off at the knees.”

Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit health newsroom whosestories appear in news outlets nationwide, is an editoriallyindependent part of the Kaiser Family Foundation.