Federal workers stress over finances as shutdown drags on : NPR

In some ways, Stephanie Rogers began preparing for this moment several months ago, when she and her two daughters moved in with their mother about a half-hour south of Denver. One of the reasons, of course, was the high prices for everything.

“When you add up the numbers between our two family households, we can't continue this long term,” says Rogers, who is 44 and divorced with no child support.

Rogers worked as a microbiologist for the Food and Drug Administration for 16 years and is now among hundreds of thousands of unemployed federal employees. She is also the branch president of the National Treasury Union (NTEU).

Another big motivation for living together? The new administration's uncertainty focused on government downsizing, as well as Rogers' memories of the last federal government shutdown in 2018.

“And now we live in this reality,” she says. “And it’s our decision to just make sure that we all survive this process.”

Her mother, Nina Chapman, says she enjoys having her granddaughters around. “I was grateful that we had a basement. It was just a great place to accommodate everyone,” she says.

Planning a life without a salary

When the previous closure stretched for 35 days, from late 2018 to 2019, Rogers says she was “completely unprepared.” So she made sure to plan better this time.

A few weeks before the shutdown, as the funding cutoff deadline loomed, she rushed to make an appointment with a doctor. She asked for her children's medications to be restocked early in case she couldn't afford them without a paycheck.

Rogers also made a painful decision that will come at a financial cost. “I had to give up my pension, which will have some tax implications for next year,” she says.

Rogers has asked for flexibility on her car payments and is thinking twice about after-school activities for her girls, who are 10 and 12 years old. They may have to miss paid excursions or volleyball games that are far away. It was planned to buy only essential products.

“We actually just had a freezer failure,” she says. “We lost meat and it’s just devastating for us because that’s what we were counting on.”

Rogers also filed for state unemployment benefits. Furloughed federal workers generally has the right to do soalthough they must return the money when the closing is complete and after they receive the retrospective payment withheld during that time.

“We don't know what our future looks like”

But President Trump has put forward the idea that some workers could be denied wagesdespite the law he signed mandating this in 2019. He also threatened with mass executions during the shutdown, a process according to the administration started on Friday. And Trump talked about permanent cutting out “Democratic programs”“, without specifying what exactly this means. Rogers says all of this makes the current closure feel very different.

“It's terrible,” she says. “I don’t know if I’ll even have a job when I leave this, much less if I’ll get paid. Do I have health insurance if we don't get a paycheck? It's a really difficult place to be when you have kids who rely on you.”

Rogers believes she and other federal workers do important work — like food inspection — that the general public will only be able to appreciate when they're gone.

But the entire federal government has been stressed all year. She said mass layoffs and funding cuts meant fewer people were working longer hours, but now they were being made to feel they weren't really needed.

“My mom is worried about [it] constantly. My daughter woke up and asked: “Does mommy have work today?” We don't know what our future looks like,” she says.

So even though she's in her dream job, Rogers says she's started applying for other positions outside of the federal government.