Some federal workers have begun to receive furlough notices, as Washington waits to see if Congress will end a partial government shutdown that began over the weekend.
The shutdown that started at 12:01 a.m. Saturday threw much of the federal government and millions of workers into limbo, amid a bitter dispute over how the Trump administration is cracking down on immigration, especially in Minnesota. The agencies affected include the Pentagon, the Treasury, and the departments of State, Transportation, Homeland Security, Labor, Education, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development. The Senate passed a package to restore their funding, but the House has yet to act.
In the meantime, the rollout of partial closures has been haphazard compared to the record-long shutdown last fall. Some agencies have given employees explicit instructions, while others have not issued general guidance as they determine whether swift action by Congress might let them avoid significant interruptions.
At the Transportation Department, about a fifth of its more than 53,000 workers were set to be furloughed, according to its detailed plan published on Friday. The vast majority of the furloughed workers are from the Federal Aviation Administration, where about a quarter of employees were to be affected by the lapse. While the department made exceptions and will pay workers in air traffic control hiring, training and safety oversight, air traffic controllers are being required to work without pay.
Employees at the Labor Department will feel an even stronger impact, with furloughs planned for almost three quarters of the staff. Parts of the Health and Human Services Department were also bracing for significant suspensions, with about two-thirds of the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health expected to be furloughed. Overall the department expected to furlough less than a third of staff, attributing that in part to Congress having already funded agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, which employs about 20,000 of the department’s roughly 75,000 employees, through Sept. 30.
At the same time, employees of the Internal Revenue Service were told to report to work at least through Feb. 7, according to a memo indicating the agency would draw on funds from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 to avoid feeling the effects of the shutdown.
By midafternoon Monday, the impact of the shutdown on other major departments was less clear.
Representatives for the Pentagon did not respond to queries about how broadly the Defense Department or its military branches had issued furlough notices, though one public affairs officer reached on Monday said that civilian employees of the press office were not at work. Uniformed personnel are traditionally expected to work through government shutdowns, usually without pay, as their roles are considered essential to national security.
The State Department’s official guidance suggested that offices with residual funding might be able to avoid the impacts of a shutdown, and that employees of affected offices would use the first workday of the funding lapse, Monday, to wind down their work. Nikki Gamer, a spokeswoman for the American Foreign Service Association, said that because of such transitional requirements, it was too soon to tell how many foreign service officers might be furloughed.
Employees of the Transportation Security Administration, part of the Homeland Security Department, are expected to work through government shutdowns without pay. During the fall shutdown, the vast majority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, as well as those from Customs and Border Protection, also worked without pay. It was not immediately clear how broadly furloughs might affect the rest of the department.
Under a 2019 law, furloughed employees are expected to get back pay once federal funding is restored. During last year’s record-long shutdown, some lawmakers challenged that requirement, arguing against paying workers who were not forced to work unpaid through the shutdown. Ultimately, federal workers were compensated for the time they were furloughed.
The conduct of ICE has been at the heart of the dispute that led to the partial government shutdown. After the fatal shootings of two citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis by federal agents as part of the agency’s immigration crackdown, Democrats bristled at continuing to fund the agency’s operations. The deal struck and passed in the Senate provides its parent department, Homeland Security, with only two weeks of funding, while funding other departments through the rest of the fiscal year, which ends on September 30.
Democrats want to use those two weeks to force restrictions on ICE’s operations through further negotiations with the White House.
John Ismay, Edward Wong and Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
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