Earlier this week, F.B.I. agents began leaving bags of canned food in a break room in the Bureau’s Washington field office. The agents and other staffers, concerned about colleagues who have been working without pay during the government shutdown, left the food for those in need. No one monitored who entered and left the room. No one tracked what was taken. Employees could take what they needed without being shamed in front of colleagues. “It’s discouraging that this is the way people who put their lives at risk are being treated by the federal government,” Tom O’Connor, the head of the F.B.I. Agents Association, told me. “To be treated this way is wrong.”

As the longest-ever U.S. government shutdown enters its fifth week, O’Connor says that the majority of the Bureau’s thirteen thousand agents are working, all without pay, and morale is plummeting. Agents continue to work cases, but O’Connor said that the shutdown “is slowing F.B.I. investigations, and it will only get worse as it drags on.” Field offices in New York, Dallas, and Newark have set up improvised food banks as well. Employees are walking into their supervisors’ offices in tears and asking for help. Others fear that they will be unable to make payments that are due and potentially fail one of the Bureau’s routine financial-background checks, which could cause them to lose their security clearance and, with it, their job. With five thousand of the Bureau’s approximately thirty-five thousand employees on furlough, all vacations have been cancelled, requests to work second jobs are rising, and retirements are being delayed.

Kevin Brock, a former assistant director of intelligence who worked at the Bureau for twenty-four years, told me that it was unrealistic to expect that agents could go without pay for long. “When you’re raising a family on a government salary, you are often living, if not from paycheck to paycheck, with a thin margin of savings,” he said. “Particularly in the cities where we’re living, it can get tight.” Field agents are based in major cities around the country. At the outset of their career, agents in the New York area earn roughly sixty-five thousand dollars. By the time they retire, they earn, at most, about a hundred thirty thousand. The highest-ranking F.B.I. executives are paid a hundred and ninety thousand dollars annually.

The long-term fear is that, given that the private sector pays more than the Bureau, the F.B.I. and other federal law-enforcement organizations will both lose experienced agents and be unable to recruit new ones. “The level of frustration—I don’t know how to articulate it,” Nathan Catura, the president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, which represents twenty-six thousand officers in the F.B.I. and dozens of other federal agencies, told the Washington Post. “It’s so high right now,” he said. “People don’t want to come into work. They’re not being paid and they don’t want to come in, and I can’t blame them.”

The shutdown comes as the Bureau struggles to defend itself from unprecedented allegations of political bias from a sitting President. After decades of efforts to distance themselves from the spying and harassment of the J. Edgar Hoover era, the vast majority of agents pride themselves on being apolitical, focussing on facts and the even-handed application of the law. Agents say that the F.B.I.’s effectiveness—from fighting crime to countering terrorism—depends on maintaining the American public’s faith in the Bureau’s independence from political interference, bias, and abuse. But the Trump Presidency—from the Russia investigation to the shutdown—is putting enormous pressure on the institution.

Trump, as usual, is the loudest voice in the room. As news reports have continued to focus on the Mueller investigation, the President has continued to make false or misleading claims about the Bureau and its former director, James Comey.

On December 16th, Trump falsely accused the F.B.I. of illegally breaking into the office of his former attorney Michael Cohen. He tweeted, “Remember, Michael Cohen only became a ‘Rat’ after the FBI did something which was absolutely unthinkable & unheard of until the Witch Hunt was illegally started. They BROKE INTO AN ATTORNEY’S OFFICE! Why didn’t they break into the DNC to get the Server, or Crooked’s office?” (A federal judge had, in fact, issued the F.B.I. a search warrant.)

On December 18th, the President falsely claimed that the Bureau had intentionally deleted thousands of texts between the former F.B.I. agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who had both been fired. Trump tweeted, “Biggest outrage yet in the long, winding and highly conflicted Mueller Witch Hunt is the fact that 19,000 demanded Text messages between Peter Strzok and his FBI lover, Lisa Page, were purposely & illegally deleted. Would have explained whole Hoax, which is now under protest!” (In fact, the Justice Department’s Inspector General found that the Bureau’s automated system for collecting messages from staffers’ mobile phones had failed.)

Trump’s attacks have divided the community of former agents as they have divided the country. Some former agents support Comey and see Trump as undermining the rule of law and the pursuit of fact that F.B.I. agents pledge to defend. Others criticize Comey and say that his call for Americans to vote for Democrats in the midterm elections and his handling of the Trump-Russia and Clinton e-mail investigations made the Bureau appear politically biased.

Brock, the former assistant director, feels that the text messages between Strzok and Page, in which they disparaged Trump and opposed his candidacy, raise legitimate questions about the neutrality of the Bureau’s Comey-era Trump-Russia investigation. Brock told me that the texts had shocked and angered many agents, who felt that they were gross violations of the Bureau’s apolitical culture. “In my twenty-four years, I recall having one political discussion, one time, that lasted about five minutes. It’s just not a conversation that happens,” he said. “Agents had just never heard anything like those texts.”

Trump’s attacks, meanwhile, are eroding public faith in the F.B.I., particularly among Republicans. A Pew Center tracking poll found that, since early 2017, the number of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents with a positive view of the Bureau has dropped by sixteen points, from sixty-five per cent to forty-nine. Democrats’ opinion of the Bureau has remained steady, with roughly seventy-six per cent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents regarding it favorably.

The shutdown only adds pressure to Bureau administrators and agents who are trying to keep the F.B.I. functioning and neutral in a Washington that grows more politicized by the day. O’Connor declined to comment on Trump’s attacks, adding that agents strongly believe that the F.B.I. must remain fully independent. “The F.B.I. is an apolitical organization,” he said. A spokesperson for the agency declined to comment on either the shutdown or Trump’s attacks. Christopher Wray, a former federal prosecutor who succeeded Comey as F.B.I. director, seventeen months ago, has emphasized that agents’ work speaks for itself and made no public comments since the shutdown began.

Brock, echoing other current and former agents, said he believed that the Bureau would weather its current struggles. He also endorsed Wray’s approach of staying out of the political maelstrom. “In this period of time in the F.B.I., that is probably a good thing. If he came out with a strong statement about the shutdown, or the F.B.I.’s struggles, he could face a backlash because of some tender feelings surrounding Comey and the Trump-Russia investigation,” Brock said. “I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt that his lack of visibility on this issue is calculated and probably correct.”

This moment in the history of the agency is unprecedented. The Bureau is buffeted by public demands from a sitting President for the F.B.I. to investigate his political opponents, demands from Trump’s opponents that the President himself be investigated, and, now, no pay. The impact of all three on the Bureau could be unprecedented as well.