Federal workers who have missed out on a month’s income find help at the facilities some of them have donated to in the past

Nurel Storey and his colleagues from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) like to give back to their community. They sometimes volunteer at Philabundance – a food bank in Philadelphia – and on 22 January, they spent the evening together packaging food for seniors in the area.

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But because of a record-shattering government shutdown that lasted for more than a month before it ended on Friday – albeit temporarily – federal employees who are usually donors and helpers at food banks have been relying on them to eat.

Storey heard some of the IRS workers who volunteered at Philabundance on Tuesday talking about attending the food bank’s emergency market for federal workers the next morning.

“You’ve worked for 10, 20, 30 years for the government,” said Storey, an officer for the National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 22. “And all of a sudden things have just been shut off, for no fault of your own.”

Some 800,000 federal workers have missed out on a month’s income due to the government shutdown. As credit card bills, rent checks and mortgage payments piled up and government employees who were furloughed or worked without pay choose between groceries or diapers, food banks across the country met the needs of people who are not accustomed to leaning on charity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest TSA employees Princess Young, left, and Erica Gibbs load food into a car after visiting a food pantry in Baltimore. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

And, even though the shutdown is now over while politicians spend three weeks trying to seek a deal on border security, the prospect of it starting again in mid-February still looms over the federal sector.

When Minnie’s Food Pantry in Plano, Texas, held a distribution for federal workers on Martin Luther King Jr Day, the nonprofit’s founder and CEO Cheryl Jackson told volunteers that if they fed one person, that would be good.

But about 80 families collected boxes to feed 226 people in their households. Jackson said all the government employees who came that day were newcomers.

“The food pantry and any other charity program is the last place they want to be. Let that be the message,” Jackson said.

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When the Greater Chicago Food Depository distributed enough food for 200 families to Chicago Midway international airport on Tuesday, representatives had to turn Transportation Security Administration employees away when demand outran supply. They then brought an additional 250 boxes to Midway on Thursday. Between workers at the US Coast Guard, a federal prison and Chicago’s two airports, the depository delivered a total of 1,295 food boxes to government employees this week alone.

Executive director and CEO Kate Maehr said she spoke with one federal worker who had actually participated in drives for the food bank. “In her words: ‘I’ve always been on the giving side. I’ve never been on the receiving side,’” Maehr said.

As US food banks tried to accommodate an unforeseen and immediate need, their money and resources took a hit. The Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank had expected to spend an extra $100,000 a week if the shutdown had continued, as they planned mobile distributions to take food directly to government employees.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest TSA worker Amelia Williams, right, collects food at a donation site set up by the Food Bank of NYC in New York. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

All of this belongs to a context where many food banks are already stretched. When the great recession hit in 2008, demand for food assistance skyrocketed and, at least in some parts of the country, it never went down.

In Chicago, Maehr’s food bank continues to feed between 800,000 and 900,000 people annually (which six weeks ago, she noted, wasn’t a news story). Because of lost jobs and changes in manufacturing, she said, that number hasn’t decreased since the economy recovered.

Michael Flood, president and CEO of the Los Angeles regional food bank, said demand for food assistance in his region went up 40% in one year during the great recession. Even as unemployment has dropped in California from more than 12% in 2010 to 4.2% in 2018, the need for food has yet to decrease dramatically – a trend he attributes to high housing costs in the Los Angeles area.

In some parts of the country, food bank organizers noticed a change when federal employees did not receive their first paycheck. Elsewhere, the urgency came when government workers realized they were likely going to miss another.

“Losing one paycheck is difficult,” Storey said. “Losing two paychecks can be catastrophic in some areas.”