Federal workers braced Friday for a possible partial government shutdown that could close national parks, slow visa and passport applications, potentially delay reimbursements to Texas for disaster recovery and leave thousands temporarily jobless ahead of the holiday season. Thousands of others will keep working, but will not be paid.

For most Texans, though, effects of the shutdown won’t likely be too harsh: Social security checks and veterans benefits will still be paid. Texas schools will stay open. Airport security will still be in full force.

Effectively, little will change for the average Texan — for now, at least. While most federal agencies are funded for the short term, it’s not clear how long they could stretch their allocations. Not is it clear how long this shutdown might last: President Donald Trump has indicated he’s willing to keep the government closed for as long as it takes to fund a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, a proposal at the center of Congressional budget debates despite Trump’s earlier promise that Mexico would pay for the proposed structure.

Trump’s statements have caused some holiday anxiety for some of the 200,000 or so federal workers in Texas who have been deemed “non-essential” and will face furloughs or delayed paychecks. Nationally, more than 350,000 workers could get temporary pink slips, and there are non-monetary effects, too. This week, the American Federation of Government Employees released internal poll results in which huge majorities of its members said they had not been given direction on what to do during a shutdown.

Included among them: Workers at Big Bend National Park and the dozen other areas in Texas that are overseen by the National Park Service. The actual parks will stay open, but areas requiring federal workers — including visitor’s centers and full-service bathrooms — will be closed, the NPS said in a statement.

Also potentially furloughed would be all but about 200 of the 3,055 workers at Johnson Space Center in Houston, which will be closed to the public, a NASA spokesperson said. Several hundred more could be on call, according to a NASA memo submitted to the White House last week.

The workforce will be enough to monitor the International Space Station, but not to offer tours and other visitor attractions inside the center.

Meridyth Moore, a spokesperson for the separate nonprofit Space Center Houston, said Friday that it’s still “business as usual” for her organization.

“Right now we’re anticipating to offer everything,” Moore said.

Mayor Sylvester Turner this week called the looming shutdown a “disservice” to Houstonians, but said the city would not suffer “any immediate funding or service loss.”

Turner also said the shutdown will not affect the city’s ability to get federal block grants to assist with recovery from Hurricane Harvey, despite the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development seeing substantial furloughs. HUD’s reimbursements to Texas for expended funds could be delayed, however, according to a Brittany Eck, a spokesperson with the Texas General Land Office, which is overseeing the more than $5 billion in federal disaster funds allocated to Texas by Congress.

Commissioner George P. Bush also wrote a letter Friday in which he asked HUD Secretary Ben Carson to “ensure that there is adequate staff excepted from a possible furlough to provide continuity in this critical ongoing disaster recovery mission.”

Congressman Will Hurd was one of eight Republicans to vote against the funding for a border wall when the House of Republicans passed its proposed budget on Thursday.

“I spent almost my entire adult life protecting this country, I have more border than any other member of Congress,” he told the Chronicle Friday. “I’ve been to the border probably more than any other member of congress. And building a wall from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security.”

He also decried the idea of using the shutdown as a political tool.

“The only way you get things done is by doing it in a bipartisan fashion,” he said. “This is where we have to realize we should be working together to get things done.”

robert.downen@chron.com