Thousands of federal workers missed their first paycheck this week as the government shutdown persisted with no end in sight.
About 670,000 workers have been furloughed, according to a tally by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank. Another 730,000 or so are working without pay.
Unpaid federal workers have been turning to gig work, like food delivery, to help cover costs. And many have been waiting in long lines at food banks around the country, according to news reports.
Among those working without pay is Pamela Ward, a telephone service representative for the Social Security Administration in Birmingham, Ala.
Ms. Ward said that she knew she would not be paid this week, but seeing a $0 paycheck was still a shock.
“It was a rough day today,” Ms. Ward, 52, said on Wednesday. “I think the roughest part is I’ve worked all my life. I’ve worked 27 years, and this is my first time ever receiving a paycheck when there was nothing on it.”
President Trump is dipping into other funds to pay the military and federal law enforcement during the shutdown.
The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates that about 830,000 federal workers are still being paid because their offices are self-funded or there is other available money to use, including funds carried over from the last fiscal year.
By law, workers are to be paid back once the government reopens. But Mr. Trump has said he may not pay back everyone, regardless of the legal implications.
Rui Carlos Pereira de Sá, a biomedical engineer and physiologist at the National Institutes of Health’s division of Health Informatics Technologies, said he had been saving money over the past nine months because he was expecting to be fired like many of his co-workers had been this year in response to Mr. Trump’s demands to shrink the size of the government.
So when he was furloughed on Oct. 1, he said his family was already used to scaling back on spending.
“I am lucky, because my wife is not in government,” said Dr. de Sá, 50, who lives in Potomac, Md., a wealthy Washington suburb. His wife is a regional manager at a biotech company. “She makes more money than me, and that gives us a little bit of a privilege that others do not have.”
Dr. de Sá said he was working with a group to collect and distribute food on Saturdays to fellow furloughed federal workers in front of his agency’s Bethesda headquarters.
Eileen Sullivan is a Times reporter covering the changes to the federal work force under the Trump administration.
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