So began the opening hours of the latest shutdown for a federal government that has become familiar with furloughs, and a country that has almost come to shrug off stalemates and spending fights — at least at first.
“It’s an annoyance, but you can work around it,” said Desmond Hadlum, who drove in with his wife, Ann, to go snowshoeing. They stopped a park ranger at the entrance gate to ask about the shutdown.
“So far, so good,” the ranger replied.
But the shutdown’s effects — especially visible on Saturday at closed or unstaffed National Park Service sites, and at checkpoints at airports and the nation’s borders as officers stood guard without pay — will be magnified once the standoff seeps past Christmas, when federal offices would ordinarily be open and staffed with the approximately 380,000 employees who have been told to stay home while President Donald Trump and Congress try to reach a spending accord.
An additional 420,000 or so employees, their duties classified as essential, were ordered to work without pay during what some elected officials, including Trump, said could be a protracted battle over the president’s insistence on $5 billion for a wall along the border with Mexico.
In interviews Saturday, some federal workers said they were frustrated by the political gridlock that left their finances uncertain.
“The big thing is, it’s already a very tough job,” said Justin Tarovisky, a correctional officer at the U.S. Penitentiary Hazelton, in northern West Virginia. “But when you know that you’ve got to go to work and you’re not going to be paid for it — or it’s going to be late, no matter what — it really brings you down.”
The Senate on Friday unanimously approved a measure that would compensate federal workers “at the earliest date possible after the lapse in appropriations ends, regardless of scheduled pay dates.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.