Federal workers affected by the partial government shutdown will miss their first paycheck on Thursday of this week, the date that the funds are set to go out through direct deposit, if Congress and President Trump do not pass spending legislation before then.
Overall, an estimated $2.2 billion in pay will not be heading out into workers’ pockets due to the shutdown, according to the liberal Center for American Progress.
The bulk of the federal workforce is paid biweekly, and the next payday is Jan. 11, according to officials with federal worker unions and congressional staffers. An estimated 800,000 workers will not get paid, with 420,000 working without pay and another 380,000 staying at home. That encompass 29 federal cabinet agencies, commissions, and other entities like NASA that haven’t received funding to operate.
“The women and men who keep our country running deserve to get their paycheck on payday,” American Federation of Government Employees National President J. David Cox, Sr. said Monday. “It’s unconscionable that starting this week, those who have worked tirelessly at our airports and federal prisons — among many other worksites and offices — will come home empty-handed.”
A spokesperson for the Center for American Progress said that the $2.2 billion in lost pay would not happen all at the same time, since a nontrivial number of federal workers have different schedules. Nevertheless, the figure does cover each biweekly pay period for the workers.
In previous shutdowns, the workers were paid what they would have gotten in a lump sum once the government re-opened. Until then, however, those workers have to make do by using savings, accruing debt, or becoming delinquent on bills. A few might not even get the back pay, said Center for American Progress analysts Saharra Griffin and Galen Hendricks.
“Employees of federal contractors — typically low-wage roles — are much less likely to receive backpay. This means that these workers will not only suffer financial stress but also permanent monetary losses,” they noted.
The largest concentration of workers having lost pay is in California, not Washington, D.C. A total of 144,000 in the Golden State will miss their paychecks, followed by Virginia with 135,000 and Maryland with 129,000.
Economists who have studied the effects of the last major shutdown in 2013 say that federal workers can weather short-term shutdowns fairly well, but the civil servants’ situation steadily worsens as the budget impasse drags on. The current shutdown has now lasted more than two weeks.
