With no end in sight to the shutdown, 800,000 federal workers had been sent home or were working without pay.
No sooner had the news of an impasse come out of a meeting room in Washington than thousands of miles away, on an island in the Pacific, Tomas Kaselionis had to start making decisions.
“For me, it’s do I consider a car payment or do I pay the gas bill or the phone bill?” said Mr. Kaselionis, who is working on typhoon recovery for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, unpaid and far from home in the United States commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. “Those are conversations within the next week that I have to have with my wife.”
By Saturday, the federal government will have been shut down for two weeks, a full pay cycle for federal workers. If the shutdown lasts through Monday, it will surpass the one of 2013, and if it lasts beyond the following Saturday, it will be the longest shutdown in United States history. Politicians have said they were hopeful that the standoff could be over in a matter of “days and weeks,” a reassurance that rang hollow to hundreds of thousands of federal workers who were not getting paid.
“They have to realize that this affects everyday people,” said Ray Coleman Jr., a corrections officer who teaches G. E. D. classes at a federal prison in Florida and is president of his local union. “It affects the boots on the ground. To me, it’s like a political chess game that they’re playing, and we seem to be pawns.”
By Thursday, fallout from the shutdown was spreading fast. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission announced on Twitter that the agency would “suspend most operations.”
Federal court proceedings, to the irritation of judges, slowed as government lawyers asked for stays. The Justice Department asked to delay a hearing on a suit brought by the N. A. C. P. over the Trump administration’s census preparations. And a much-anticipated E. P. A. hearing on lead contamination in East Chicago, Ind., was canceled.
All the while, claims for unemployment benefits were piling up; the District of Columbia said it had received about 900 claims connected to the shutdown, and the state of Maryland counted 637 at midweek. More than 350 federal workers in Colorado had filed unemployment claims.
“People are, to be frank, a little pissed,” said Daniel A. Sobien, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Tampa, Fla., who has been furloughed and is living on savings. “They’re tired of being political pawns. I realize that unfair things happen to people all the time, but it really is unfair that because of politics, government employees have to shoulder the burden.
