10 views

Oct. 2, 2025, 12:48 PM EDTBy Shannon PettypieceJenna 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’d see her colleagues or a paycheck again.“I feel really sad,” said Norton, who is among the roughly 750,000 federal employees furloughed this week as part of a government shutdown. “It was weird walking out the door and saying goodbye to everyone and not knowing when I’ll see them again.” We’d like to hear from you about how you’re experiencing the government shutdown, whether you’re a federal employee who can’t work right now or someone who is feeling the effects of shuttered services in your everyday life. Please contact us at tips@nbcuni.com or reach out to us here.Those furloughed employees won’t be paid until Congress passes legislation to fund the government, with neither side showing signs of budging as the shutdown entered its second day. While most of the furloughed employees won’t be allowed to work during the shutdown, others who are deemed essential — such as members of the military and airport security screeners — will have to continue working without pay. Federal workers typically receive back pay once the government reopens, but that requires congressional approval.On top of the uncertainty around when workers will see a paycheck again, the Trump administration has threatened to use the shutdown as a pretext to carry out more mass firings. “They’re really scared,” 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. “We’ve got people who are the primary income earners with very young children, and they’re going to be going without a paycheck and they don’t know what this is going to mean for them going forward.” That’s 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.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. “We 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,” she said, adding that her bank rejected her request for a deferment on her $1,700 a month mortgage. 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. “Everybody 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’re wondering, without this paycheck, how am I going to pay this bill, where’s my next meal going to come from?”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 federal workers it has deemed as being against its agenda.“I was never afraid to speak my mind before, I never felt afraid to talk. Now, people are afraid,” an Arizona TSA worker said, explaining her concerns over speaking publicly about how the shutdown is impacting her. 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’d 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’s worried about being able to even afford the $88 a week at the gas pump she needs to get to work. “I’m working as a civil servant for the citizens of America to make their traveling safe,” she said. “Do 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?”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. “This is not something that any federal worker wants, but at the same time, enough is enough,” said M.T. Snyder, who works for the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency that ensures employers follow laws protecting workers’ rights to organize. “We 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.”The Trump administration has said the federal workforce would shrink by around 300,000 workers 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, an initiative started in the early days of the Trump administration by billionaire Elon Musk. 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. 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. 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 in the coming days warning that their premiums will soon go up unless Congress extends the funds.“I am thinking about the suffering that always happens in a shutdown, the harm that happens when people don’t get the services that they need, and as a federal worker, I won’t be paid during the shutdown,” Norton said. “But I’m 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.”Shannon PettypieceShannon Pettypiece is senior policy reporter for NBC News.

- Latest News - October 2, 2025

Furloughed employees won’t be paid until Congress passes a bill to fund the government, with neither side showing signs of budging as the shutdown entered its second day.

Source link.

TAGS:
11 views

Oct. 2, 2025, 12:53 PM EDTBy Natasha Korecki, Amanda Terkel, Monica Alba and Matt DixonDepartment of Education employees furloughed this week discovered their email accounts had been manipulated while they were out of office to include partisan talking points that blamed a government shutdown on Democrats. Five employees who spoke with NBC News and provided copies of their out-of-office messages said the wording was altered from how they originally had composed them. All of them are civil servants, not political appointees, and requested anonymity out of fear of professional repercussions. Education officials had initially sent employees templates of nonpartisan out-of-office wording to use in their emails. Several employees said they used the language provided by department officials earlier in the week only to find that while they were furloughed, someone had changed it. We’re looking to hear from federal government workers. If you’re willing to talk with us, please email us at tips@nbcuni.com or contact us through one of these methods.One person said they changed their out-of-office message back to the nonpartisan version, only to have it then revert to the partisan wording later. “None of us consented to this. And it’s written in the first-person, as if I’m the one conveying this message, and I’m not. I don’t agree with it. I don’t think it’s ethical or legal. I think it violates the Hatch Act,” this person said, referring to the law that imposes limits on political activity by federal employees.“I took the statement that they sent us earlier in the week to use. And I pasted it on top of that — basically has a standard out-of-office,” another one of the Department of Education employees said. “They went in and manipulated my out-of-office reply. I guess they’re now making us all guilty of violating the Hatch Act.” Follow live updates on the government shutdownOn Wednesday, NBC News reported that some employees at federal agencies were being offered partisan language blaming Democrats for the shutdown to use as their out-of-office messages. A number of federal websites also now display language going after Democrats or the “radical left.”But what the Department of Education is doing goes further, pulling individual civil servants into the political talking points even if they don’t agree with them. The agency did not immediately return requests for comment. One spokesperson had an out-of-office message that did not contain any partisan language, instead saying, “There is a temporary shutdown of the U.S. government due to a lapse in appropriations. I will respond to your message if it is allowable as an excepted activity or as soon as possible after the temporary shutdown ends”The altered email messages included language saying: “Thank you for contacting me. On September 10, 2025, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5371, a clean continuing resolution. Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate which has led to a lapse in appropriations. Due to the lapse of appropriations, I am currently in furlough status. I will respond to emails once government functions resume.” One of the employees said they were not overly worried about getting hit with a Hatch Act violation, saying the department has crossed into a level of partisanship they’d never seen without anyone being held accountable. In this case, the employee was incensed that someone else’s message was connected to their name. “Nobody follows the law anymore, so why does it matter? It seems like laws are dotted lines now, not solid lines. It seems there’s no one to hold this administration accountable to laws,” one of the employees said. As far as fearing any repercussions, they said: “Clearly, this wasn’t done by me, it was done while I was in a furlough status, I think I’d be able to argue that point.” Natasha KoreckiNatasha Korecki is a senior national political reporter for NBC News.Amanda TerkelAmanda Terkel is politics managing editor for NBC News Digital.Monica AlbaMonica Alba is a White House correspondent for NBC News.Matt DixonMatt Dixon is a senior national politics reporter for NBC News, based in Florida.

- Latest News - October 2, 2025

Department of Education employees furloughed this week discovered their email accounts had been manipulated while they were out of office to include partisan talking points that blamed a government shutdown.

TAGS: