The partial shutdown of the government may have gone into effect over the weekend, but with the first two days of the work week federally declared holidays, Wednesday marked the first day most federal workers — of which there are more than 50,000 in Colorado — found themselves forced off the job.
For Chris Fowler, a project manager with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Denver, the work stoppage resulting from an impasse in budget negotiations between the Trump administration and Congress means another period of unwelcome uncertainty for him and his colleagues.
“I have a mortgage to pay, a daughter in college and a son about to graduate high school,” said Fowler, who went through the 16-day partial federal government shutdown five years ago. “The bottom line is we shouldn’t have to do this — we should be at work.”
But Fowler and 800,000 fellow federal employees across the United States are now furloughed — or required to work without pay — as President Donald Trump continues to insist that Congress allocate $5 billion to fund construction of a wall along the Mexican border. The president last week rejected a short-term spending bill that would have averted a shutdown because it didn’t contain enough money for a border wall.
Fowler, who serves as vice president of the local chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees, said Washington’s stark political divide is at the heart of the dysfunction enveloping the federal government, which already endured two shutdowns — albeit short ones — in 2018. And federal employees have become “pawns” in the repeated political standoffs, he said.
“We have two parties that just stare at each other hoping the other side blinks,” Fowler said Wednesday. “The federal employee has just become another rider in an amendment someone is trying to pass. We’re bargaining chips.”
“Frustrating to be in this situation”
Even though federal workers typically are compensated with back pay for the time they are forced to sit idle (the U.S. Senate last week approved a measure to do just that for the current shutdown), it doesn’t alleviate the pain that many federal employees who struggle financially must endure while the shutdown is in effect.
“There are a lot of people in my office who live paycheck to paycheck,” said Britta Copt, who works in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s safe drinking water enforcement unit in Denver. “It’s frustrating to be in this situation constantly. It gets really old.”
Copt said the uncertainty posed by a shutdown is one of its biggest challenges. A colleague who is planning to head to California to help with disaster recovery in the wake of deadly wildfires there isn’t clear on whether that assignment will still be happening, she said.
“It’s stressful, constantly wondering if we’re coming to work,” she said.
The shutdown, which began at midnight Saturday, is affecting about 25 percent of the federal government’s operations. Many essential services — including mail delivery, food stamps, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid programs and Transportation Security Administration screening at airports — will continue.
Colorado’s federal workforce is robust in the Denver-Boulder area, with thousands of employees working at the Federal Center in Lakewood and the National Renewal Energy Laboratory in Golden, and thousands more at other labs, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder.
Federally funded research facilities here contributed about $2.6 billion to Colorado’s economy in fiscal year 2015, and supported more than 17,600 jobs, according to a report from the business research division of the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado.
Taking a toll on morale
The eventual extent of the shutdown is unknown at this point, with lawmakers out of town for the holidays making it difficult to achieve progress before the new Congress convenes next week. On Christmas Day, the president made it clear that the government will remain closed until he gets the wall funding he seeks.
“I can’t tell you when the government is going to reopen,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “I can tell you it’s not going to be open until we have a wall, a fence, whatever they’d like to call it.”
Trump also told reporters that many federal employees support the shutdown. That claim was immediately countered by Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 members at 33 federal agencies and departments.
Reardon called the shutdown a “travesty” and said, “Congress and the White House have not done their fundamental jobs of keeping the government open.”
Jeff Kelly, who has spent 4 1/2 years working for the Department of Interior in Lakewood, said he will get particularly worried if the shutdown stretches into a third or fourth week.
“I’ve got enough money to go through one billing cycle,” he said Wednesday, citing child support, a mortgage and a car payment as obligations he needs to be able to satisfy.
Kelly said the unwillingness or inability of government leaders to agree on anything more than temporary spending measures of late — and to impact the livelihoods of federal workers in the process — has taken a toll on morale.
“There’s less appreciation and understanding of the work federal workers do,” he said.
