“Due to the current federal funding hiatus, I will not be able to return emails or telephone calls until I return to duty,” Baugh wrote. He does not know when that will be.
“I have a feeling this could go on for a while,” Baugh, 34, said later. “It’s that uncertainty that makes it hardest to plan.”
The consequences of the latest federal government shutdown, rooted in President Donald Trump’s demand for a wall along the southern border, came into sharper focus Wednesday, when elected officials seemed no closer to a deal, and government offices were scheduled to open after being closed for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
From the brutalist-style headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington to a federal recreation area near Atlanta, employees and visitors were often missing. The Bureau of Economic Analysis, an arm of the Commerce Department, said it would suspend any planned data releases. The Justice Department sought delays in certain cases. And as government workers closed their offices, supervisors told them to watch the news for word of when they could return.
The shutdown could affect more parts of the government in the coming days, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Smithsonian Institution, which operated Wednesday with carry-over funds that will quickly run out.
About 380,000 federal employees have been furloughed and have no guarantee the government will cover their back pay as it has after other shutdowns. Another 420,000 employees, including air traffic controllers and food safety inspectors, have been classified as essential and will eventually be paid for their work during the shutdown. But they will not be compensated until the government reopens, potentially leaving them in a similar financial lurch.
“Obviously it’s concerning that there’s no real feedback that this is going to be wrapping up shortly,” said Doreen Greenwald, who lives in Wisconsin and was furloughed from her job with the IRS. “We’re all kind of waiting to see how we go forward. Do we apply for unemployment? Do we start looking for part-time jobs?”
Such decisions are likely to become more pressing in the coming days, especially if Congress and Trump remain at such sharp odds.
The most recent federal pay period ended Saturday, and the government said checks “should be issued at the normal time.” But if the stalemate stretches on, future payments could be delayed or reduced. The District of Columbia’s Department of Employment Services said it expected to receive at least 12 times as many unemployment claims as it normally does.
Worries among federal employees have intensified since the shutdown began early Saturday, but Trump asserted this week, without evidence or elaboration, that many “workers have said to me — communicated — stay out until you get the funding for the wall.”
The claim earned mixed reviews from rank-and-file workers.
“There’s no federal employee who’s going to say, ‘Yes, stop paying me, Mr. President, I don’t mind,'” said Rich Guzofski, who also works for the IRS. “To be having this conversation over a wall is stupid,” he added.
Steve Reaves, the president of the union for Federal Emergency Management Agency workers, also cast doubt on Trump’s claim.
“All of Homeland Security, these are the people President Trump claims to be out there and fighting for,” said Reaves, who is stationed in the Dallas area. “They’re the people who are being impacted. They’ve got mortgages. They’ve got to still pay bills.”
But a Customs and Border Protection employee in Boston, who did not want her name used because she was not authorized to speak publicly, said that while she was frustrated by the shutdown, she felt that the Democrats were partly to blame and that she supported the president’s push for a border wall.
“I support the president, period,” she said, adding, “The money for border security, I think, is very important.”
Supportive of Trump’s border wall campaign or not, federal employees repeatedly expressed deep concerns about the consequences of the shutdown on their personal finances.
The National Treasury Employees Union, which counts Greenwald among its local leaders in Milwaukee, conducted a survey after the shutdown began and said about 78 percent of respondents reported that they were “very concerned” about how the impasse would affect their ability to pay basic living expenses, bills and rent. About 87 percent of respondents said they had cut, or planned to reduce, spending during the shutdown.
“No going out to dinner, no going out to shows,” Guzofski said as he reported to the largely empty Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. Federal Building in Boston to aid in the “orderly shutdown” of the government. “This could last for weeks. I have to do something, and the only thing I can do is not spend money.”
The government even prepared sample letters for its employees to send to their creditors.
“I am a federal employee who has recently been furloughed due to a lack of funding of my agency,” the suggested letter to a landlord reads. “Because of this, my income has been severely cut and I am unable to pay the entire cost of my rent, along with my other expenses.”
Congress, which is expected to reconvene Thursday but may not take immediate action to end the shutdown, has signaled that it will eventually pay government workers. It did so after a 16-day shutdown in 2013, when the Obama administration estimated that “the largest direct cost” of the stoppage was work that went unperformed — and the $2 billion the government paid employees for it.
Last week, the Senate unanimously approved a measure to compensate federal workers “at the earliest date possible after the lapse in appropriations ends, regardless of scheduled pay dates.”
For now, though, all the employees can do is wait and wonder when, exactly, their checks will come.
Guzofski said he would spend his time off doing repairs on his 100-year-old house. He said he planned to contact his congressional representatives to express his frustration with the shutdown.
Baugh, who was visiting his parents in North Carolina, said he would return to Washington this weekend. If the government did not open by Monday, he said, he might do some volunteer work, or perhaps work on his language skills with Rosetta Stone software.
Meanwhile, people expecting to use certain government services were pleased and often surprised when they found that they still could.
Yefrey Rebolledo was waiting in line for an expedited passport Wednesday afternoon at the Federal Building in west Los Angeles. He needed a replacement passport after his was stolen. He was attempting to travel to Colombia within the next two days to go see his grandmother, who is terminally ill. The shutdown, to his relief, had not closed the passport agency.
“I was worried about that,” Rebolledo said. “If they shut down this week, I was like, what am I going to do? That would have been something else.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.