\n<\/p>\n
M<\/span>ore furloughs, more anxiety and more economic stress are bearing down on federal employees as the shutdown of the federal government continues into its fourth week with Republicans and Democrats at a standstill on negotiating a budget deal.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no sight of this ending and we\u2019re starting to wonder if we\u2019re going to be made whole and if this is going to continue into the next round of pay, which is what we\u2019re headed into now. On Friday, we will be missing our first full paycheck,\u201d Johnny Jones, council secretary treasurer for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) TSA Council 100, and a TSA employee in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, said.<\/p>\n \u201cNow people are really starting to get nervous. They\u2019re starting to make preparations for liquidations or they\u2019re making preparations in their lives of how we\u2019re going to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n He cited cases of members crying and starting to get desperate, citing the previous shutdown in 2019 where he and other co-workers had to help a co-worker transport her children to Colorado to be with family because she could no longer afford childcare.<\/p>\n \u201cI just can\u2019t believe we\u2019re not going to get paid,\u201d Jones added. \u201c It\u2019s unbelievable. If you worked at McDonald\u2019s and they did this, they could sue you, shut your business down, but you\u2019re working for the government, they cannot pay you, and it\u2019s OK. And this is a problem. People are now going to have to take home debt. People are going to have to take on new things, maybe even work their full shift, pick up their kids and do GrubHub or something, looking for other means of income on the side.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile in Washington, the deadlock continues.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t have a strategy,\u201d Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, told reporters on 21 October, as the House of Representatives\u2019 calendar for October remains empty. House members have been on paid vacation since 19 September, when it went on recess.<\/p>\n The House speaker\u2019s office said in a statement: \u201cHe has consistently said that the House will return to regular legislative session as soon as Chuck Schumer and the Democrats vote to end the shutdown and reopen the government.\u201d<\/p>\n Democrats have held firm on a budget that includes extending healthcare subsidies that would prevent health insurance premiums from soaring for millions of Americans, resulting in loss of health insurance for about 15 million Americans due to the subsidy expirations and cuts to Medicaid.<\/p>\n Throughout and leading up to the shutdown, federal workers have been subjected to threats by the Trump administration, which have included threatening to withhold back pay to furloughed workers, conducting reductions in force (though a federal court has temporarily blocked the firings), and cutting federally funded infrastructure programs with threats to go after programs deemed priorities for Democrats.<\/p>\n Trump referred to Russell Vought, the White House office of management and budget director, as \u201cDarth Vader\u201d on 21 October.<\/p>\n \u201cThey call him Darth Vader, I call him a fine man. He\u2019s cutting Democrat priorities, and they\u2019re never going to get them back,\u201d Trump said, in claiming the shutdown allows the administration to enact cuts to federal services and programs.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s played hell with our psyche, for sure,\u201d said Ruark Hotopp, District 8 national vice-president of the AFGE in the midwest and an employee at the US Citizenship and Immigration Service, on the consistent attacks on federal workers since January 2025, from \u201cdepartment of government efficiency\u201d (Doge) cuts, to rhetoric from Vought and other Trump administration officials criticizing federal civilian employees.<\/p>\n Hotopp explained he was in Washington DC lobbying various members of Congress around these issues last week, and the threats were laughed off by Republican Senate staff.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was a Republican senator\u2019s office, and they reassured me that, while we understand what the president\u2019s saying, that we don\u2019t agree with the president\u2019s position, and it is the full intention of the United States Congress to make sure these those folks get paid. So while that\u2019s reassuring to me, to see this sort of public rhetoric to the folks on the frontlines, that\u2019s not reassuring at all,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe president is one of the very first people to say this rhetoric needs to be toned down, while he then fans the flames,\u201d added Hotopp. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to get back to some sort of normalcy, it has to start with the president himself.\u201d<\/p>\n Nicole Cantello, president of the AFGE Union Local 704 and an attorney at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), explained the rollout of furloughs had been \u201cchaotic\u201d for federal employees at the agency, with the EPA using leftover funds to stave off furloughs in the beginning of the shutdown, only for mass furloughs to be issued earlier this week.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m located here in the Great Lakes, and we are the ones that do all the work to try to protect the Great Lakes. Drinking water for over 40 million people come from the Great Lakes. The people that check the health of the lake to those who find cases against polluters, all those inspectors, they were all just furloughed,\u201d Cantello said. \u201cThe human health and environment will definitely be impacted. More pollution will go out.\u201d<\/p>\n She expressed concern for the prolonged shutdown and its impact on attrition. Since January 2025, the EPA said its workforce had been slashed from 16,155 employees to 12,448 employees through firings, retirements and buyouts. The Trump administration had attempted to cut dozens more workers at the agency through a reduction in force during the shutdown.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven everything that\u2019s happened here, who knows who will come back from the furlough?\u201d Cantello said. \u201cI don\u2019t have a good handle on that, but I\u2019m worried that we\u2019re losing and more people and the agency will be rendered even more ineffective.\u201d<\/p>\n A spokesperson for the EPA would not comment on or provide numbers on how many workers were furloughed at the agency, but said: \u201cCongressional Democrats are not only unwilling to vote for a clean funding bill, but their goal is to inflict as much pain on the American people as possible. The false narratives being peddled by union bosses and their Democratic allies are nothing more than deliberate fear-mongering designed to create chaos and deceive hardworking Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" More furloughs, more anxiety and more economic stress are bearing down on federal employees as the shutdown of the federal government continues into its fourth week with Republicans and Democrats at a standstill on negotiating a budget deal. \u201cThere\u2019s no sight of this ending and we\u2019re starting to wonder if we\u2019re going to be made<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30517,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[15618,319,558,3716,11209,13942,1438],"class_list":{"0":"post-30516","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-drags","9":"tag-federal","10":"tag-government","11":"tag-paid","12":"tag-shutdown","13":"tag-squeezed","14":"tag-workers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}