Ten days into a government shutdown, federal workers are officially feeling the pinch.
Today was supposed to be payday. Instead, hundreds of thousands are being forced to do without.
More than 600,000 federal workers are currently furloughed, with about triple that number being forced to work without receiving paychecks – including active-duty military who are due to miss their first paycheck next week.
Why We Wrote This
While many Americans aren’t feeling the impacts of the government shutdown, federal workers just missed their first paycheck – the latest blow in a tough year.
But it’s not just the pause in paychecks 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 already out of the job. And they’re on edge from threats by both President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought that they’ll use the shutdown to lay off more people, or deny some of them back pay when the shutdown ends.
One former State Department employee, who was laid off this past summer, won’t get her severance pay until the government reopens. Her husband is still a federal employee and is now out on furlough. (She asked that his department not be named, for fear of retaliation.)
“The shutdown has been a significant issue for our family financially because we had gone from two incomes down to one. And now that one income is gone as long as the shutdown goes on,” she says.
She faces a bleak job market due to the glut of recently laid-off workers, and has stopped eating out and is bargain-hunting at the grocery store. She’s debating whether she should pull her young daughter out of day care to save money – a tough move to reverse, given that day-care centers in the Washington area often have monthslong waitlists, making it hard to return to work if she does find a job.
Shutdowns often begin with a whimper and end once voters start feeling genuinely inconvenienced by its effects. But it’s the workers themselves who are most sharply affected. And this one seems like it might go longer – and cut deeper – than other shutdowns.
An impasse in Congress
Both parties appear dug in for a prolonged fight. Democrats are demanding that Republicans include funding to extend government subsidies for people on Obamacare who are about to see huge premium increases. They also want assurances that the Trump administration won’t renege on new budget agreements, as it has in recent months by firing people and refusing to spend money allocated by Congress. Republicans are insisting on a no-strings-attached bill that continues government spending at previously agreed levels until late November.
So far, polls indicate that voters are blaming Republicans more than Democrats for the shutdown, and that they overwhelmingly support extending the Obamacare subsidies.
Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, told the Monitor on Wednesday that most of his constituents “aren’t paying much attention right now” to the shutdown because they’re not feeling it themselves.
“People in America are distracted with many other things. People [in D.C.] are putting too much stock in how much this matters to the average voter right now,” he said. “It’s only government employees that are paying the most attention to it. And my heart goes out to them.”
The last significant government shutdown was in early 2019, lasting a record-setting 35 days. Then, President Trump relented in part because normal people began feeling the shutdown’s impact – and polls showed voters blamed him. Major airports, including LaGuardia and Newark Liberty International in the New York region, experienced 90-minute flight delays because of the shutdown. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport had fast-growing 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 seen significant delays as some air traffic controllers have called in sick.
Impact on military service members
It’s not just civilian government workers who are facing real-world fallout from this shutdown.
Active-duty military members are supposed to be paid on Oct. 15, and this will be the first time in recent history that military members weren’t exempted from a shutdown. There’s a bipartisan bill to exempt active-duty military members, and building pressure from rank-and-file lawmakers to vote on it. But House GOP leaders have so far stuck by their refusal to call members back to town to cast any votes unless Senate Democrats decide to fold.
On Thursday, GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson went on C-SPAN to take voters’ calls – and was promptly berated by Samantha, a Republican military spouse based at Fort Belvoir in Virginia who said her family was living paycheck-to-paycheck and had “two medically fragile children” who would not “get the medication needed for them to live their life” if her husband doesn’t get paid on time.
“You have the power to do that. And as a Republican, I’m very disappointed in my party, and I’m very disappointed in you because you did have the power to call the House back,” she said. “I am begging you to pass this legislation. My kids could die.”
Speaker Johnson responded by expressing empathy – and blaming Democrats for refusing to support a clean extension. “We had a vote to pay the troops. It was the continuing resolution three weeks ago,” he said.
Notably, a number of government workers laid off or placed on furlough say they are glad Democrats forced the shutdown, despite the pain it is causing them personally. They say they’ve been subjects of abuse from the Trump administration for months, and are happy Democrats are finally standing up and exerting some leverage.
“I’m glad, actually, about the shutdown,” says one federal employee, saying they are relieved to see Democrats “putting a foot down and actually trying to hold ground.”
Paring back on summer camp and after-school care
Another former federal worker who spoke with the Monitor was laid off earlier this year. His spouse is still employed in a federal job, but she asked that the department not be named for fear of retaliation from Trump administration officials.
“It is traumatizing – as intended,” he says. They’ve tightened their belts, pulled their child out of summer camp programs after his layoff, and canceled their school aftercare to save money. He says job prospects in the area are sparse. They’re considering moving out of the Washington area in search of a better job environment.
“To be perfectly honest, the joy of living in the DMV is gone,” said the worker, referring to the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia region. “It’s been demolished.”
OMB Director Vought said that was the goal in a 2024 speech outlining his vision for a second Trump term.
“When [bureaucrats] wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” he said. “We want to put them in trauma.”
All of the federal workers interviewed for this story say they worry the Trump administration will follow through on its threat to lay off more federal workers as retaliation against Democrats, and try to block back pay for federal occupations they don’t like after the shutdown ends. The White House has internally circulated a memo from the Office of Management and Budget arguing that federal workers aren’t automatically entitled to back pay, despite a 2019 law that President Trump himself signed to guarantee exactly that.
“We will be making cuts that’ll be permanent. And we’re only going to cut Democrat programs, I hate to tell you,” President Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday. “They wanted to do this, so we’ll 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. One new IRS employee spent the first months of the year checking their email every morning to find out whether they’d been laid off, as Mr. Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency moved to lay off all probationary employees who had begun work within the year, a category the new employee fell into. Their recent furlough is just another “unpleasant thing that’s happening on top of all the other unpleasant things that are happening this year.”
A Food and Drug Administration employee says they feel like they were being “used as pawns” once again. A Census Bureau employee says the constant threat of layoffs has felt like “a swinging ax over our heads” all year. A Department of Labor employee says half of their colleagues had already been laid off this year, so the shutdown pales next to the “wrecking ball” the administration had already brought to the department.
One current State Department employee says he is more worried now about not getting back pay than in previous shutdowns, when it hadn’t been legally guaranteed, because the Trump administration has been “ignoring the law [in] all sorts of ways.” A former federal worker predicts that the Trump administration will be happy to fight it out in court – and even if it loses, the damage would be done to families who went months or more without paychecks.
The State Department employee says this shutdown feels markedly different than other ones he’s been through. This time, the shutdown comes after months of worrying whether his job – and whole bureau – would be eliminated. So far, it has survived. There’s been next to no communication from the department’s higher-ups – even compared with the 2019 shutdown when Mr. Trump was in office.
“It felt like you were getting kicked for a year,” he says. “And now, it feels like you don’t exist.”
Victoria Hoffmann reported from Boston.
