After a month of the shutdown, workers face mounting bills, car repossessions [View all]

[Zorro]

Finances are becoming dire for the more than 750,000 government workers who have been going without pay for a full month.

The government has been closed for a full month — and federal workers who have missed two paychecks are now using credit cards to pay their bills, visiting food pantries to stock their kitchens and reviewing their bank accounts, plotting exactly how long they can manage without a salary.

The answer is not much longer for Cynthia Brown, a Government Publishing Office staffer who has been working without pay. The 53-year-old said she is barely eating, subsisting on coffee and protein shakes.

She has already sold everything she could find in her house, including two old iPhones, and started a GoFundMe to help cover her expenses. She had hoped to drive for DoorDash to supplement her income, but her car was repossessed after she missed a loan deadline because of the shutdown.

Brown spends her days ensuring that the government keeps a record of congressional proceedings, so she has closely followed the debate around reopening. And that has only made her situation — and the nation’s — feel more dire, she said: “It is going nowhere. That is what scares me. They are not making any progress.”

Starting to cry, Brown added, “They hate each other so much, and we — we are just caught in the middle.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/01/shutdown-hits-federal-employees/

Once the government does finally reopen I suspect this administration will be firing thousands of more government workers.