WASHINGTON – IRS tax examiner Lori McLaurin is used to hearing from people in a financial bind who are looking for help.

But the single mother now finds herself among their ranks thanks to the partial government shutdown that’s left her furloughed and without a paycheck.

“I hear a lot of stories,” McLaurin said, at one point choking back tears. “I don’t know how they got into their situation. But this one right here, it wasn’t my doing.”

For McLaurin and thousands of other federal employees across the country, Friday is the day when the partial federal government shutdown officially hits their pocketbooks.

It was supposed to be payday. But paychecks are on hold for some 800,000 federal employees forced to go on unpaid leave or work without pay since Dec. 22 because of the government shutdown.

It’s the first time during the 21-day shutdown – which on Saturday will become the longest in U.S. history – that workers will have missed a paycheck. Though the standoff is nearing its fourth week, most federal employees were paid on Dec. 28 for the final two-week pay period of 2018.

Now, with no paycheck coming in the foreseeable future, many are wondering how they will make ends meet.

“When they say, ‘one paycheck away from homeless,’ I’m not there, but I’m real close. And it’s disturbing,” said McLaurin, a 28-year IRS veteran who works out of the agency’s Philadelphia office.

The uncertainty caused by the shutdown has left many workers anxious, confused and frustrated, said Ryan Baugh, a furloughed statistician in the Office of Immigration Statistics in the Department of Homeland Security and a steward for the American Federation of Government Employees union.

“We just don’t know when it will be over, so we don’t know how to plan,” Baugh said. “Should we cut back? Should we start looking for other jobs? Should we apply for unemployment?”

Steve Reaves, a furloughed fire safety official for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said his wife works as a sales manager in the private sector and started taking on extra hours in early December so they could pay their mortgage in the event of a shutdown.

“She didn’t get to spend as much time with the family during the holidays,” said Reaves, who lives in Arlington, Texas, and is president of AFGE Local 4060.

Because FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security, furloughed employees can’t get moonlighting jobs without approval from their supervisors, Reaves said.

“The problem is the managers have been furloughed,” he said. “It’s like a catch-22. You can’t go out and get a new job to make ends meet.”

McLaurin, too, is worried about making the next mortgage payment on the house she shares with her college-aged daughter.

On Thursday, she boarded a bus with nearly 100 employees out of the Philadelphia IRS office and traveled to Washington to rally near the White House with other displaced federal workers represented by the National Treasury Employees Union.

On the same bus was Horatio Fenton, a contact representative for the IRS who lives in Lumberton, N.J. After decades of paying his bills on time, Fenton is worried about making his utility and mortgage payments as well. Soon he’ll be filing for unemployment for the first time since he joined the federal government 25 years ago.

“We’ve had furloughs before, but I’ve never had to file for unemployment because it was always assumed it would be short term and you’d be back to work,” Fenton said. “But this one’s a little different. Both sides are dug in, and we’re paying the cost for that. I’m not sure if there’s an end to this.”

In Washington, Democrats and Republicans profess empathy with the impacted workers.

“These families, many of them veterans, are not able to meet their mortgage payment, their rent payment, their car payment, harming their own credit ratings,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., placing the blame on Trump for triggering the shutdown with his demand for funding to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump’s insistence on $5.7 billion in border wall funding has been the main sticking point in a budget standoff that led to the government shutdown.

The president “doesn’t appreciate the role of public policy in the lives of the American people,” Pelosi said.

For his part, Trump said earlier this week that he can relate to the pain of federal workers who can’t pay their bills. But, “I’m sure that people that are on the receiving end will make adjustments,” he said. “They always do.”

The billionaire president’s words ring hollow to McLaurin and other federal employees.

“He says a lot of things, but he doesn’t have real accountability for what he says,” she said. “How can you relate when you’ve been born with so much?”

FBI agents added their voices to the thousands of federal employees Thursday calling for an end to the government shutdown, asserting that the bureau's diminished resources put national security and investigative operations at risk.

An estimated 5,000 of the bureau’s 35,000 agents, analysts, lawyers and other personnel have been furloughed, limiting support for some surveillance and laboratory operations, said Thomas O'Connor, president of the FBI Agents Association.

With the agency and the rest of the federal government facing the prospect of missing a paycheck Friday, O'Connor said the burden could weigh most heavily on agents who are required to meet their financial obligations to maintain security clearances necessary for their work.

"Financial security is national security," O'Connor told reporters, adding that the ongoing shutdown was "entering uncharted territory" as the longest suspension of government operations in history.

In a petition to lawmakers and other government leaders, the agents’ group said the personal financial disruption "could even disqualify agents from continuing to serve in some cases" because of the potential damage to their clearance status.

FEMA workers also are “freaked out” that their security clearances could be in jeopardy, Reaves said.

“They are afraid that because they are not able to pay their bills in a timely manner, it will affect their (security) clearance investigation,” he said. “And if it affects their clearance investigation and they can’t get a clearance, they lose their jobs. I can’t appeal that. I can’t take that to court.”

Other employees who continue to work without pay include thousands of air-traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration and tens of thousands of checkpoint screeners at the Transportation Security Administration.

Even before the shutdown, the number of air-controllers had dropped from a peak of 11,753 in 2012 to 10,483 in September 2018, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, a union representing the workers.

“Overtime in the form of six-day weeks and 10-hour days is common at many of the nation’s busiest and most short-staffed facilities, including radar facilities in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Dallas,” said Paul Rinaldi, an air-traffic controller who is president of the union.

“And none of the controllers forced to work during this shutdown will see pay for their hard work to keep travelers safe until the shutdown ends,” Rinaldi said. “This shutdown must end now.”

Two unions representing federal workers – AFGE and the National Treasury Employees Union – have filed suit, arguing that the government is violating federal law by forcing some employees to work without pay during the shutdown.

The affected workers could eventually get back pay once the shutdown is over, but that’s not guaranteed since it would require an act of Congress.

“People feel like they are caught between a rock and a hard place,” Baugh said, adding that many believe they are being used as leverage in a political battle that has nothing to do with their jobs.

“There’s a real sense of disbelief,” he said. “People never thought this would go on this long.”

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