Ten days after the government shutdown began, federal workers are officially feeling the effects.
Today was supposed to be payday. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people are forced to go without.
More than 600,000 federal workers are currently unemployed, and about three times that number are forced to work without receiving pay – including active-duty military personnel who will not receive their first paycheck next week.
Why we wrote this
While many Americans are not feeling the impact of the government shutdown, federal workers narrowly missed their first paychecks — the latest blow in a difficult year.
But it’s not just the break in salaries that’s causing them stress. The shutdown comes amid an ongoing purge of the federal government by the Trump administration, which has eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs, shuttered entire agencies and left many remaining workers worried about their job security. Some have spouses who are also former federal workers who are already unemployed. And they are on edge over threats from President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought that they would use the shutdown to lay off more people, or deny some of them back pay when the shutdown ends.
A former State Department employee who was laid off last summer won’t receive her severance pay until the government reopens. Her husband is still a federal employee and is now on leave. (She asked that her department not be named, for fear of retaliation.)
“The shutdown was a significant financial hit for our family because we went from two incomes to one. And now that income is gone while the shutdown continues,” she says.
She faces a bleak job market due to a glut of recently laid-off workers, and has stopped eating out and is looking for bargains at the grocery store. She wonders if she should pull her young daughter out of daycare to save money — a difficult decision to reverse, given that Washington-area daycares often have months-long waiting lists, making it difficult to return to work if she finds a job.
Shutdowns often begin with a whimper and end when voters begin to feel genuinely bothered by its effects. But it is the workers themselves who are hit hardest. And this one looks like it could last longer – and be deeper – than the other stops.
An impasse in Congress
The two sides appear to be engaged in a prolonged fight. Democrats are demanding that Republicans include money to expand government subsidies for people on Obamacare who are about to see huge premium increases. They also want assurances that the Trump administration won’t backtrack on new budget deals, as it has done in recent months by laying off people and refusing to spend money allocated by Congress. Republicans are insisting on a no-strings-attached bill that keeps government spending at agreed-upon levels through the end of November.
Polls so far indicate that voters blame Republicans more than Democrats for the shutdown, and overwhelmingly support extending Obamacare subsidies.
Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, told the Monitor on Wednesday that most of his constituents “aren’t paying much attention right now” to the shutdown because they aren’t feeling it themselves.
“People in America are distracted by many other things. [in D.C.] “We’re putting too much emphasis on how important this is to the average voter right now,” he said. “It’s just government employees who pay the most attention. And my heart goes out to them.”
The last significant government shutdown occurred in early 2019, lasting a record 35 days. Then President Trump caved in part because normal people began to feel the impact of the shutdown — and polls showed voters resented him. Major airports, including LaGuardia and Newark Liberty International in the New York area, experienced flight delays of 90 minutes due to the closure. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport saw a rapid increase in wait times in security lines a week before the city was set to host the Super Bowl.
This time around, airports such as Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport have already experienced significant delays as some air traffic controllers called in sick.
Impact on the military
It is not only civil servants who are faced with the concrete consequences of this closure.
Active-duty military personnel are scheduled to be paid on October 15, and this will be the first time in recent history that military personnel will not be exempt from a shutdown. There is a bipartisan bill to exempt active-duty military members and pressure rank-and-file lawmakers to vote on it. But Republican leaders in the House of Representatives have so far stuck to their refusal to call members back to town to vote unless Senate Democrats decide to step aside.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson went on C-SPAN to answer constituents’ calls Thursday — and was quickly chastised by Samantha, a Republican military spouse based in Fort Belvoir, Va., who said her family lives paycheck to paycheck and has “two medically fragile children” who wouldn’t have “the medications they need to live their lives” if her husband was not paid on time.
“You have the power to do this. And as a Republican, I’m very disappointed in my party, and I’m very disappointed in you because you had the power to recall the House,” she said. “I beg you to pass this legislation. My children could die.”
President Johnson responded by expressing empathy – and accusing Democrats of refusing to support a clean extension. “We voted to pay the troops. That was the resolution in effect three weeks ago,” he said.
Notably, a number of fired or furloughed officials say they are glad Democrats forced the shutdown, despite the pain it causes them personally. They say they have been subjected to abuse by the Trump administration for months and are happy that Democrats are finally standing up and exerting some influence.
“I’m actually happy about the shutdown,” one federal employee said, saying he was relieved to see Democrats “putting their foot down and trying to hold on.”
Reduce summer camps and after-school care
Another former federal employee who spoke to the Monitor was fired earlier this year. His wife still holds a federal job, but she asked that the department not be named for fear of retaliation from Trump administration officials.
“It’s traumatic – as expected,” he says. They tightened their belts, pulled their child out of summer camps after he was laid off, and canceled their school attendance to save money. According to him, job prospects in the region are rare. They are considering leaving the Washington area in search of a better work environment.
“To be completely honest, the joy of living in the DMV is gone,” the worker said, referring to the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia region. “It was demolished.”
OMB Director Vought said that was the goal in a 2024 speech outlining his vision for a second Trump term.
“When [bureaucrats] “We want them not to wake up in the morning, we want them not to want to go to work because they are increasingly seen as bad guys,” he said. “We want to traumatize them.”
All federal workers interviewed for this article say they fear the Trump administration will follow through on its threat to lay off more federal workers in retaliation against Democrats, and will try to block back pay for federal professions they don’t like after the shutdown ends. The White House internally circulated a memo from the Office of Management and Budget asserting that federal workers are not automatically entitled to back pay, despite a 2019 law that President Trump himself signed to ensure exactly that.
“We’re going to make cuts that will be permanent. And we’re only going to cut Democratic programs, I hate to tell you,” President Trump said at a Cabinet meeting Thursday. “They wanted to do this, so we’re going to give them a little taste of their own medicine.”
A year of job uncertainty
This comes after months of stress and uncertainty for federal workers. A new IRS employee spent the first months of the year checking his email every morning to see if he had been fired, while Mr. Trump’s new Department of Government Effectiveness decided to fire all probationary employees who had started work during the year, a category to which the new employee fell. Their recent furlough is just another “nasty thing happening on top of all the other nasty things happening this year.”
A Food and Drug Administration employee says he feels like he’s being “used as pawns” again. A Census Bureau employee says the constant threat of layoffs has been like “an ax hanging over our heads” all year. A Labor Ministry employee says half of his colleagues have already been laid off this year. The closure is therefore nothing compared to the “wrecking ball” that the administration had already brought to the ministry.
A current State Department employee says he’s more worried now about not getting his pay back than during previous shutdowns, when it wasn’t legally guaranteed, because the Trump administration is “ignoring the law.” [in] in all kinds of ways. » A former federal official predicts that the Trump administration will happily fight in court — and even if it loses, the harm would be done to families who have gone months or more without a paycheck.
The State Department employee says this shutdown is markedly different from other shutdowns he’s experienced. This time, the closure comes after months of worry about whether his job — and the entire office — would be eliminated. So far he has survived. There has been virtually no communication from senior department officials – even compared to the 2019 shutdown, when Mr. Trump was in office.
“It was like you were kicked out for a year,” he says. “And now it’s like you don’t exist.”
Victoria Hoffmann reported from Boston.
