When a government attorney for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration went to work after the 43-day government shutdown ended, a banner outside the building read: “Welcome back NOAA!” Someone had managed to put it up before employees arrived, despite the back-to-work notice arriving after 11 p.m. the night before.
“It was touching,” the attorney says. “It’s good to be back.”
She was among the roughly 670,000 government employees furloughed during the country’s longest federal shutdown, which ended on Nov. 12 when Congress approved a spending bill through the end of January. The workers spanned government agencies from the NOAA to the Justice Department.
Why We Wrote This
The government shutdown affected federal workers and the jobs they do on behalf of Americans. As they go back to work, some reflect on the value of what they do, and the mountain they have to climb to make up for missed time.
Workers have stacks of emails to sift through and phone calls to return.
Some might take a few days to get caught up at work, while for others it could take weeks – which means the same is true for Americans who rely on government services. And for some workers, the shutdown was one more blow in a difficult year, as the Trump administration has sought to diminish the federal bureaucracy by encouraging early retirements or by layoffs – including firing roughly 4,000 during the shutdown. (They will be brought back as part of the deal that ended the shutdown.)
The Monitor spoke with six federal workers about their return. All but one asked that their names not be used because they’re worried they could be fired for talking publicly – and one cited a Washington Post report that the Trump administration plans to fire an Agriculture Department employee for giving a television interview in which she talked about the impact the shutdown would have on her team. The employees who spoke with the Monitor all said they were speaking for themselves, not for their agencies.
They had watched the shutdown drag on, often reminded they were designated as “nonessential” workers. Now, they’re wanting to move forward.
“I think all of us felt like we were losing momentum,” says another NOAA employee. “I’m just ready to go back and serve the public.”
“The first person I’m calling back”
The NOAA attorney spent her first morning back helping colleagues cart boxes of office plants from their cars, passing the banner on the agency’s building along the way.
Her job is to enforce violations of federal marine resource laws for the NOAA. Right away, she noticed several missed emails and phone calls from a fisherman who had been prosecuted in a civil case only days before the shutdown began.
He wanted to pay his civil penalty so he could close out the case. But, because of the shutdown, the NOAA couldn’t send him a bill.
“That is the first person I’m calling back,” she decided. “I feel quite bad that he’s been waiting for almost seven weeks for a response from the agency when he’s trying to do his part to take responsibility.”
As she catches up with missed work, the attorney’s biggest priority is making sure enforcement cases are active and can move along. She’s confident she can get it done, but it will take some juggling.
Another NOAA employee, who has worked for the agency for more than 25 years, found a way to reconnect with the agency’s mission. While furloughed, she walked 63 miles along Monterey Bay in California, picking up trash along the way as she listened to the waves.
The first thing on her to-do list is filling out her time sheet to finally get paid. But her priority is on a job she believes in: getting money sent to educational programs the NOAA helps fund – which are designed to nurture knowledge of Earth sciences in new generations of Americans. It’ll take weeks, perhaps a month, to get back to speed.
She can get most programs caught up – but not all of them. Some of the schools she works with have missed field trips they can’t reschedule. Some school and community gardens receiving federal funding missed a planting season.
The projects “are all going to be impacted in small ways, and some in very large ways,” she says. “I’m not saving peoples’ lives. But I do believe that my presence in my community is valuable.”
“It’s constant change”
At the Defense Department, one employee returning to the office said she was pleasantly surprised that the tech staff had made sure all computers had updated software and security patches, which potentially would have created a heavy backlog of computers unavailable for use.
The one glitch: Employees with expired common access cards, which allow people to get into buildings, had to have them renewed.
Even though there weren’t major return-to-work problems, going back to the office carries a personal toll.
“After a month, we have gotten used to being home and taking care of people in our household,” says the employee. “It’s high stress, it’s constant change. … I’ve considered leaving.”
“There’s going to be a mad rush”
Theresa Kim didn’t treat her furlough as a vacation. She spent the time volunteering, helping an organization called 27 UNIHTED raise more than $20,000 for families affected by the shutdown. She spotted at least 10 of her colleagues from the National Institutes of Health at these volunteer events.
“It was a time to reflect on who needs us,” she says, “and where can we serve?”
Now, Dr. Kim is back to her regular work in health systems research. But it doesn’t feel like things are back to normal – especially with government funding set to run out again in January unless Congress passes a new spending bill.
“I’m sure there’s going to be a mad rush of trying to complete things before January 31 comes,” she says, because she believes the government will shut down again.
That means two big scrambles, she says: one to catch up on projects before the holidays, and another to get more tasks out the door before the end of January.
The shutdown that began on Oct. 1 and ended last Wednesday could also have a significant impact on the research grant process for scientists, says another employee of the National Institutes of Health.
For example, the employee says the NIH might have to cut the number of grant applications they’re able to look over, because of lost time for review.
“This places our long-term competitive and financial edge at risk,” the NIH worker says. “Many breakthroughs in medical treatments and tech are started with taxpayer-funded grants.”
“We were all used as pawns”
One civil servant at the Justice Department didn’t have much of a backlog. That’s partly because the cases she was working on were also suspended during the furlough, so it’s not too hard to pick up where she left off.
But the workload is also lighter because she works in the agency’s civil rights division, and their caseload has been greatly reduced under the second Trump administration. Now, the division’s focus is on antisemitism cases – not on potential rights violations against Black, Hispanic, or LGBTQ+ people.
In her more than 20 years of government work, the civil servant has seen other shutdowns. She says she and her colleagues were expecting something like this to happen, and she had money saved that helped her make it through, though she said she had furloughed friends who were “really stressed.”
However, when the Trump administration suggested in early October that some workers might not receive back pay, despite a law requiring it, that was very concerning.
“We were all used as pawns in this war with the Republicans and the Democrats,” she says.
The administration says it is working to pay back all employees.
Despite the challenges they face, though, there’s a common sentiment from government employees: They’re glad to be back to work.
“We don’t go into this job thinking we’re going to make a lot of money,” says Dr. Kim. “We go into it because we want to serve our country.”
Caitlin Babcock and Scott Baldauf reported from Washington, and Ali Martin from Los Angeles.
