{"id":3811,"date":"2025-10-07T11:24:28","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T11:24:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/07\/battered-by-mass-firings-and-doge-drama-federal-workers-now-brace-for-weeks-without-pay\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T11:24:28","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T11:24:28","slug":"battered-by-mass-firings-and-doge-drama-federal-workers-now-brace-for-weeks-without-pay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/07\/battered-by-mass-firings-and-doge-drama-federal-workers-now-brace-for-weeks-without-pay\/","title":{"rendered":"Battered by mass firings and DOGE drama, federal workers now brace for weeks without pay"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jenna Norton drove out of the parking lot of the National Institutes of Health office in Maryland on Wednesday morning with a lump in her throat, leaving behind her research on kidney disease patients and not knowing when she\u2019d see her colleagues or a paycheck again.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel really sad,\u201d said Norton, who is among the roughly 750,000 federal employees furloughed<\/a> this week as part of a government shutdown. \u201cIt was weird walking out the door and saying goodbye to everyone and not knowing when I\u2019ll see them again.\u201d <\/p>\n

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We\u2019d like to hear from you about how you\u2019re experiencing the government shutdown, whether you\u2019re a federal employee who can\u2019t work right now or someone who is feeling the effects of shuttered services in your everyday life. Please contact us at<\/strong><\/em> <\/strong><\/em>tips@nbcuni.com<\/strong><\/em><\/a> <\/strong><\/em>or reach out to us<\/strong><\/em> <\/strong><\/em>here<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Those furloughed employees won\u2019t be paid until Congress passes legislation to fund the government, with neither side showing signs of budging as the shutdown entered its second day<\/a>. While most of the furloughed employees won\u2019t be allowed to work during the shutdown, others who are deemed essential \u2014 such as members of the military and airport security screeners \u2014 will have to continue working without pay. <\/p>\n

Federal workers typically receive back pay once the government reopens, but that requires congressional approval.<\/p>\n

On top of the uncertainty around when workers will see a paycheck again, the Trump administration has threatened<\/a> to use the shutdown as a pretext to carry out more mass firings. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re really scared,\u201d said Lauren Leib, a land law examiner at the Bureau of Land Management in New Mexico and president of the National Treasury Employees Union Local 340. \u201cWe\u2019ve got people who are the primary income earners with very young children, and they\u2019re going to be going without a paycheck and they don\u2019t know what this is going to mean for them going forward.\u201d <\/p>\n

That\u2019s left federal workers, already drained and demoralized by months of layoffs and funding cuts, scrambling to figure out how to cope with the possibility of weeks without pay and a new round of layoffs, according to nearly two dozen federal workers who reached out to NBC News to share how the shutdown was impacting them.<\/p>\n

One State Department employee in his 20s said he was planning to deliver food for DoorDash and drive for Uber to pay his bills. The wife of a Department of Homeland Security worker in Ohio said she had to borrow $600 from a colleague to cover her co-pay on a set of leg braces she needed to pick up this week for her disabled child. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe run the risk, if this goes on longer than a week or two, of not being able to pay our mortgage and the possibility of losing our house,\u201d she said, adding that her bank rejected her request for a deferment on her $1,700 a month mortgage. <\/p>\n

She said her oldest daughter has already asked if the shutdown will mean they will lose their home and have to move in with relatives and change schools. <\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody thinks that federal workers get paid this really good money. But what my husband does, people who are in the military, who work for TSA, they struggle just like everybody else,” she said. “They are going to work without being paid, they\u2019re wondering, without this paycheck, how am I going to pay this bill, where\u2019s my next meal going to come from?\u201d<\/p>\n

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Like nearly all federal employees whom NBC News spoke with, she asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, which has publicly fired<\/a> federal workers it has deemed as being against its agenda<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was never afraid to speak my mind before, I never felt afraid to talk. Now, people are afraid,\u201d an Arizona TSA worker said, explaining her concerns over speaking publicly about how the shutdown is impacting her. <\/p>\n

The TSA worker, who will have to continue working without pay during the shutdown, said she has enough in savings to get by for two to three weeks because she\u2019d borrowed some extra money over the summer while refinancing her home in anticipation of a shutdown. But if the shutdown goes beyond a few weeks, she\u2019s worried about being able to even afford the $88 a week at the gas pump she needs to get to work. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m working as a civil servant for the citizens of America to make their traveling safe,\u201d she said. \u201cDo you want me worrying about your safety or do you want me worrying about how am I going to feed my kid? How am I going to be able to afford her medication? How are we going to survive? Am I going to lose my house?\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, the TSA employee and several others with whom NBC News spoke said they were in support of the shutdown despite the near-term hardship, if it meant pushing back against cuts the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress have been making to health insurance programs and other federal services. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not something that any federal worker wants, but at the same time, enough is enough,\u201d said M.T. Snyder, who works for the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency that ensures employers follow laws protecting workers\u2019 rights to organize. \u201cWe really need to stand up for our services that we provide and the agencies that enforce laws because, since Trump has been in office, his main goal has been destroying these agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Trump administration has said the federal workforce would shrink by around 300,000 workers<\/a> this year, to a total of 2.1 million people, as a result of voluntary resignations and firings led by the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative started in the early days of the Trump administration by billionaire Elon Musk. <\/p>\n

At the NIH, Norton said she feels like the government has already been slowly shutting down since the Trump administration began sweeping funding cuts and new barriers were put in place limiting medical research, including the work she does trying to develop real-world interventions to reduce health disparities among kidney disease patients. <\/p>\n

Despite the cutbacks she will have to make without her paycheck, she said she is glad to see Democrats in Congress doing something to stand up to the attacks by the Trump administration on federal workers and the services they provide. <\/p>\n

Democratic leaders in Congress have said they want to see an extension of Obamacare subsidies that expire at the end of the year included in a bill to keep the government open, something Republicans have refused to agree to. People who get health insurance through Obamacare will begin getting notices<\/a> in the coming days warning that their premiums will soon go up unless Congress extends the funds.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am thinking about the suffering that always happens in a shutdown, the harm that happens when people don\u2019t get the services that they need, and as a federal worker, I won\u2019t be paid during the shutdown,\u201d Norton said. \u201cBut I\u2019m also looking at this bigger picture and continuing the status quo just seems so much worse. So I think somebody in Congress needs to do something to rein in the lawlessness and this just seems to be one of the few opportunities they have for doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jenna Norton drove out of the parking lot of the National Institutes of Health office in Maryland on Wednesday morning with a lump in her throat, leaving behind her research on kidney disease patients and not knowing when she\u2019d see her colleagues or a paycheck again. \u201cI feel really sad,\u201d said Norton, who is among <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3812,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3811","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}