For families nationwide, Washington’s gridlock makes it impossible to plan ahead for a $250 student loan bill or $2,400 mortgage payment
The Washington Post spoke with federal employees who opened up their pocketbooks, broke down their largest expenses and described their biggest fears if there is a shutdown. (Many stressed that their frustrations were their own, and not representative of their government agencies.) Here are some of their stories.
- Job: American Federation of Government Employees SSA Council 220 president, Social Security bilingual claims specialist
- Salary: $84,000
- Number of weeks of savings: less than a month
- Household size: 4
- Biggest expense: $1,500 for one month of day care, $1,900 for mortgage
Jessica LaPointe is already mentally preparing to sift through her automatic withdrawals on her checking account and cancel upcoming payments. The single mother of four, who has three kids at home, knows some payments won’t go through if she isn’t getting paid.
“If I’m not getting income, then there’s no blood from a stone there,” she said.
She can’t use a credit card to pay for many of her regular expenses, such as her mortgage or day care for her youngest child. Instead, she will get a letter from her employer to send to creditors explaining the situation. She hopes they allow her to make some payments late: “Right now, I am doing a lot of belt-tightening and sort of hoarding all of my resources at hand.”
LaPointe, a union council president representing workers, is paid by the Social Security Administration, her longtime employer. LaPointe will continue working without a paycheck, as will many of her colleagues. Still, she said, people who rely on the agency’s benefits will see some disruptions.
“Our anxiety’s flaring up again,” she said. “Obviously the stress of the situation can’t be understated.”
The idea of going into the holiday season without a paycheck is scary, she said: “Most of us live paycheck to paycheck.”
- Job: Regional field technician, Army National Guard
- Salary: $83,000
- Number of weeks of savings: about 8
- Household size: 3
- Biggest expense: mortgage of $1,450
Brian Robinson has been through more shutdowns than he can count. When he couldn’t go to work for 34 days in 2018, his son was just a baby.
But the prospect of a shutdown in 2023 feels different, in large part because inflation is already straining his family’s budget. Each time he goes to the grocery store, the bill goes up by a few dollars at least. He also needs to replace a sewage line behind his home near Pittsburgh. He initially got a quote for $7,000, before it jumped to $8,500.
Robinson’s wife works part time as a social worker, and he thinks they will still manage their mortgage payment so long as he doesn’t miss multiple paychecks. Back in September, before Congress passed a last-minute stopgap bill, Robinson had set aside some cash to take his first-grader son to the pumpkin patch. It was one of the plans he really wanted to stick to, through all the uncertainty.
“I get that one side wants one thing, one wants another thing,” Robinson said. “And I get there’s going to be disagreements. But for federal employees to have to be a part of that is what I really don’t understand. I don’t know why it has to be that way.”
Prince George’s County, Md.
- Job: Legal assistant at Social Security Administration
- Salary: $73,000
- Number of weeks of savings: 1
- Household size: 3
- Biggest expense: $2,200 mortgage
When Shadone Taylor went through a government shutdown in 2013, she applied for unemployment benefits and food stamps to keep enough food on the table. She had to pay late fees for rent and electricity when she fell behind on bills.
Back then, Taylor’s parents helped her get by. But her mother died nine years ago, and her father died of covid in 2020. Taylor said that now, without that support system, a shutdown represents “a completely different fear.” She has felt the anxiety building, like she’s holding her breath, wondering whether Congress will broker a deal in time. It angers her that legislators would continue to get paid but scores of workers like her would not.
Taylor, a legal assistant at the Social Security Administration and president of AFGE Local 3615, which represents government employees, knows she would be considered “essential.” That means she would also needs enough money to keep the internet on while she works from home. She doesn’t want to have to choose between paying for gas or groceries. But she’ll need to make sure her son — the quarterback of his high school football team — has enough food when he comes home from practice.
“We’re all thankful for our jobs,” Taylor said. “But when we get to the table this Thanksgiving, are we giving thanks for our jobs where we’re not going to get paid?”
- Job: Reference technician at the National Archives in St. Louis
- Salary: $50,920
- Number of weeks of savings: zero
- Household size: 2, plus 4 cats
- Biggest monthly expense: $494 car payment, $1,015 mortgage payment, $296.92 student loan
The bills quickly pile up for Katherine Terry. There’s the nearly $300 per month in student loans she just started repaying. There’s the mortgage payment. There’s her list of home repairs, including a flooded basement. A surgery from this summer and a few more lingering medical bills. Add another $494 from her car payment, and there’s no savings left.
Terry’s anxiety creeps up in the days and weeks before a potential shutdown. It’s hard to envision how she could afford to miss one of her paychecks, or even two. She bristles at comments she sees online from people dubbing the shutdown as a free vacation for federal employees.
Terry would rather be at work, where she handles archival military records and other personnel files dating back decades. Before the last looming deadline, she was working with a 97-year-old man who wanted to see his father’s military service records. She worries about these unending debates holding up her work — and the rest of her life.
“It’s a bizarre sort of situation to find yourself in on such a regular basis. It doesn’t create stability for anybody,” Terry said. “It’s this recurring situation you just are never going to escape from, if you want to keep working for the government, at least.”
- Job: Wildland firefighter (Forestry technician, fire)
- Salary: $34,000/year plus overtime (18 pay periods)
- Number of weeks of savings: 2 months
- Household size: 1 (lives with 5 roommates in ranger housing)
- Biggest weekly expense: Groceries, $100, and gas, $50
Benjamin Young typically works part of the year for the government as a permanent seasonal employee, fighting wild fires in northern Utah. He worries that a shutdown could force his work year to end early, leaving him to accelerate his offseason plans and scramble to find housing if he has to move out of the government-owned ranger housing where he lives in the Ashley National Forest.
“I’m worried about how long it’s going to be and being without pay for this long,” Young said.
Young is in a decent place financially, he said, and can weather a couple months without a paycheck. But the uncertainty the shutdown is causing is concerning — especially because his job regularly involves hazards.
“It’s pretty bad conditions, and I have no idea what it would be like being on an active incident during a shutdown,” he said.
Young is currently on assignment fighting a wildfire in North Carolina, where he would likely continue to work through the shutdown.
- Job: Customer service representative at IRS
- Salary: $73,688
- Number of weeks of savings: 6-7
- Household size: 2
- Biggest expense: $2,400 mortgage
Beth Willwerth has been here before. She’s been an IRS employee since 2009, and managed to get through the last shutdown, in part, because she could lean on her then-husband’s salary. Since then, she’s used to shutdown debates rolling around every year or so. But 2018 left her with the fear that “there’s a possibility this could go on for 35, or even more days.”
Now Willwerth covers all the bills for her and her teenager. That includes a mortgage payment on the house she bought last year, and the $59 it takes to fill her Kia with gas and shuttle her 15-year-old back and forth to school. Recently she had to pay $1,200 to cut down a dead maple tree hanging over her driveway.
“You’re left saying, ‘Okay, great, we got over this last hump,’ but then you’re just adding another hump to it,” Willwerth said of the ongoing impasse on Capitol Hill. “Federal employees have to constantly live in this environment.”
- Job: Interpretive park ranger at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park
- Age: 34
- Salary: $2,400 every two weeks
- Number of weeks of savings: 8 weeks
- Household size: 2, with a baby on the way
- Biggest expense: $1,700 mortgage, groceries
Isaac Wickenheiser’s budget is already tight, and the threat of a shutdown isn’t helping. With inflation so high, he’s already eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, nixing ham and cheese. He has monthly payments for his mortgage and for student loans ($500). And in a few months, he and his wife will become parents.
Wickenheiser didn’t join the federal government to get rich. He said he “got bit by the National Park bug” as an intern over a decade ago, and now is a full-time interpretive park ranger at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia.
With every new shutdown deadline, it’s hard for Wickenheiser to plan ahead, he said. Recently, he and his wife opted for a deferred payment plan for a $9,000 roof replacement.
“We’re talking about where we can cut back, where we can trim,” Wickenheiser said. “We’ll have to do a lot better planning on meals.”
- Job: National airspace operations manager, Federal Aviation Administration
- Salary: $165,000
- Number of weeks of savings: Couple of weeks
- Household size: 2, plus dogs, cats, horses and goats
- Biggest expense: $1,400 mortgage, plus husband’s medical bills
Lynda Bloomberg has worked for the Federal Aviation Administration since 1997 and has lost track of the number of shutdowns she’s endured. This year has been particularly scary. Her husband was diagnosed with Stage 3 esophageal cancer earlier this year.
Her husband still receives $1,300 in Social Security retirement funds. But if she loses any income from her job as a national airspace operations manager, they’d have a hard time covering their mortgage, car payment and medical bills. As an essential worker with an hour-long commute, Bloomberg would also have to keep spending $40 on gas to do her job.
Bloomberg is once again stocking up on dog and cat food, plus shelf stable items like potatoes, pasta and rice. She always makes sure to have steak and chicken stashed in the freezer, and said it will be “bare bones” if she misses a paycheck.
She’s left with the feeling of being held “like a pawn” by Congress every year.
“We’re going into the holidays now. It’s just a pain,” Bloomberg said. “They seem to forget that they work for us.”
- Job: U.S. Agriculture Department research agricultural economist
- Salary: $112,000
- Number of weeks of savings: 6 months
- Household size: 2
- Biggest weekly expense: Groceries/eating out $400 to $500, curling $150
Ashley Spalding knows she is in a fortunate position — she has savings, and if the shutdown drags on, she won’t have to immediately make any financial cuts. But dipping into her savings isn’t ideal for her long-term financial goals.
The USDA worker and her husband are avid members of a curling team and enjoy eating at restaurants — expenses she expects to have enough money to continue if a shutdown hits, at least for the foreseeable future.
The biggest immediate inconvenience for Spalding is her work itself. “I was already in a scramble to catch things up,” she said. Spalding was away from work for five weeks earlier this year while she was treated for breast cancer. Being shut out of work now could set her behind on making her deadlines. “Now I have to have more weeks off work when trying to catch up.”
The continued uncertainty is already affecting how she spends her time at work.
“It causes disruptions in that we all lose work time just talking about and planning for it,” she said.
- Job: Technical writer for Defense Department
- Salary: $97,000
- Number of weeks of savings: less than 4
- Household size: 3, plus “the zoo”: three dogs, one bird, two lizards and a tortoise
- Biggest expense: $1,300 mortgage, $250 per month in student loans, plus electricity, internet, groceries
When Allison Buettner was growing up and money was tight, her mother would cook using the cheapest ingredients around. Ramen noodles with ground beef. Omelets for dinner. Lasagna from the freezer.
Buettner has been reaching for the same playbook, fearing she won’t be able to go to her job at the Defense Department, where she works on technical manuals for soldiers to use in the field. She’s kept an eye out for chicken on sale for 99 cents per pound. Last week, she pulled together leftovers from her refrigerator to make extra soup and stash it away in her freezer.
If a shutdown kicks in, she knows she’ll have to wait until the last possible day to pay her family’s mortgage. If she misses an entire paycheck, she would have to call her mortgage company and ask to delay her payment. That could mean late fees, putting her “at the mercy of the creditors,” she said.
Her husband would still be paid from his nongovernment job. And the couple receives supplementary security income for Buettner’s 21-year- old stepson, who has autism and lives at home. But Buettner makes double her husband’s salary, and she estimates that without her paycheck, there will barely be enough to cover food and utilities.
“Maybe it’s not going to affect the national economy that much,” Buettner said. “But it’s going to affect me. It’s going to affect my family. It affects my well-being.”
- Job: Financial analyst, Army
- Salary: $92,000
- Number of weeks of savings: 6 months
- Household size: 2
- Biggest expense: $1,100 mortgage, car payments of $400 and $335 per month
Anthony Schrantz, a financial analyst for the Army, likes to spend his extra time as a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician. Now that another shutdown deadline is creeping closer, Schrantz is on deck to cover extra shifts.
The extra money from those shifts — around $12 an hour — won’t go too far toward his mortgage and two car payments. He’d prefer a job he can always count on, but Schrantz doesn’t mind the idea of having more time to visit his wife in her fourth-grade classroom over lunch and help his community. Schrantz said working for the federal government is like going through spurts of “everything is fine,” and then, as shutdown deadlines approach, “everything is on fire.”
“What the heck is going to happen this time?” he said. “I just want to know a plan.”
Amy Nakamura contributed to this report. Editing by Karly Domb Sadof, Haley Hamblin, Mike Madden and Mina Haq.