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.

[Read more: What is and is not affected by the federal government shutdown.]

“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.”