Many federal government agencies are on the verge of shutting down because of President Donald Trump’s insistence on forcing American taxpayers to pay billions of dollars for an unnecessary border wall they don’t want.
Now, 420,000 federal workers will be forced to work without pay, and another 380,000 federal workers will be sent home over the holidays without pay. If there is a prolonged shutdown, these workers will be without a paycheck until President Trump ends his temper tantrum over not getting his wall and signs appropriations bills funding these agencies.
Federal workers have families and children whom they support and who could be hurt if they aren’t paid. And these workers live in communities everywhere across America. Eighty percent of federal workers live outside of the Beltway area.
Click here to view estimates of how many federal workers in each state will go without a paycheck during this government shutdown.
Authors’ notes on estimates: The total number of employees for each state and each agency is from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) FedScope June 2018 data, available at https://www.fedscope.opm.gov. Totals include employees of agencies funded by the seven appropriations bills that have not been enacted: agriculture; commerce, justice, science; financial services and general government; homeland security; interior; state, foreign operations; transportation; and housing and urban development. These estimates exclude agencies or subagencies whose funding will not lapse because they are fee-funded or subject to permanent appropriations. They also exclude the U.S. Department of State due to data limitations. Some agencies may have limited carryover balances that they could use to fund some payroll costs for a brief period of time. The sum of these state-by-state estimates are less than the national total, because some OPM locational data are suppressed, and some employees are outside of the 50 states and Washington, D.C.
Seth Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Saharra Griffin is a special assistant at the Center.