An estimated 750,000 federal employees are furloughed as a result of the first federal government shutdown since 2018.
Many have been “on edge for months”, according to James Kirwan, who works as a labor attorney inside a government agency. Now the Trump administration is threatening to implement another sweeping wave of cuts to their ranks.
Shutdowns cause widespread disruption – both to government services and the lives and livelihoods of the staff that typically work to deliver them.
Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of the Feeding America network of food banks, warned “many people” in the US are “a single missed paycheck” away from needing to turn to a food bank for support. “A prolonged shutdown will deepen the strain, and more families will seek help at a time when food banks are already stretched due to sustained high need,” she said in a statement.
The shutdown “hurts federal workers in many ways”, Kirwan, who organizes with the Federal Unionists Network, said. “We want to be working. We want to be serving the public.”
During a shutdown, many federal workers, especially those earning less than $100,000 annually, are forced to dip into savings, rack up credit-card debt, or take out loans to survive until they receive back pay when the government reopens, Kirwan said.
“And that doesn’t even go into all the emotional and psychological harm too. We are federal workers because we care deeply about the federal government, and we care deeply about serving our constituents and the public,” he added. “To be kept from our ability to serve the American public, it hurts.”
“And then”, Kirwan continued, “you add in the fear that we might be fired”.
The Trump administration has faced criticism for ordering federal agencies to draw up plans for mass-scale firings in the event of a government shutdown. The US president suggested he would use the pause to “get rid of a lot of things we didn’t want” earlier this week.
Trump has already overseen the largest mass resignation in US history this week, with more than 100,000 federal workers set to formally quit as part of the latest wave of his administration’s deferred resignation program.
Now workers are left wondering if this shutdown will leave them out of work temporarily, or set the stage for their permanent termination.
In a memo seen by the Guardian, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced a “reduction in force” (RIF) program of layoffs at the agency on Wednesday, the first reported agency to do so.
“Approximately one percent of the USPTO workforce will be affected by this RIF,” wrote Valencia Martin Wallace, acting commissioner for the USPTO, wrote to employees at the agency. The USPTO did not respond to a request for comment
At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), only about 1,700 out of 15,000 workers are set to keep working during the shutdown.
“The workers who do the majority of the frontline work will be furloughed and potentially RIF’ed,” said Justin Chen, an environmental engineer and president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 238, which represents thousands of EPA workers. “We may be recalled for emergencies, but the workers who do the work which prevents those emergencies won’t be done.”
Even workers who are still working, for the time being, are bracing for possible layoffs amid the shutdown.
“We still are yet again finding, as federal employees, a level of concern as our livelihoods being used as a pawn, being used in this showdown between Donald Trump and the oligarchs against the working class,” said Colin Smalley, who works for the US army corps of engineers in Chicago, and represents 300 workers as president of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 777. “They are trying to extract these big changes on the backs of the public services federal workers provide and our communities run on.”
The Trump administration estimates it will cut the federal workforce by about 300,000 workers by the end of the year.
Much of these cuts have yet to be reflected in monthly jobs report data, which will not be released due to the shutdown. As of August, federal employment is down 97,000 jobs.
The last shutdown started in December 2018 and lasted 35 days, until January 2019, costing the US economy an estimated $11bn, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Kirwan suggested the federal government, since Trump took office, has already effectively been operating under a partial shutdown, with about one-eighth of the federal workforce removed, several agencies dismantled and programs eliminated.
“We do not want a shutdown, but we know that the most important thing is standing up against further harms through our programs,” he said. “More and more harm has been happening every single month to programs that are critical and that tens of millions of Americans rely upon.
“I hope that the budget that is passed will come with assurances that will protect against further harms to critical programs, because we serve the public. Our government serves the public, and we need to make sure that there are no further harms to those programs.”
Labor unions filed a lawsuit on Tuesday over the firing threats, alleging the move is unlawful and an effort to punish workers and pressure Congress.
“Announcing plans to fire potentially tens of thousands of federal employees simply because Congress and the administration are at odds on funding the government past the end of the fiscal year is not only illegal – it’s immoral and unconscionable,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, in a statement. “Federal employees dedicate their careers to public service – more than a third are military veterans – and the contempt being shown them by this administration is appalling.”
