NASA workers relieved but wary as shutdown ends — for now

Valencia Budd, a retired NASA employee, protests with others outside of NASA's Johnson Space Center against the government shutdown Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2019, in Houston. Valencia Budd, a retired NASA employee, protests with others outside of NASA's Johnson Space Center against the government shutdown Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2019, in Houston. Photo: Melissa Phillip, Houston Chronicle / Staff Photographer Photo: Melissa Phillip, Houston Chronicle / Staff Photographer Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close NASA workers relieved but wary as shutdown ends — for now 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

NASA engineer Paromita Mitra was driving to a food bank Friday when she received word that the federal government would resume business after a 35-day partial shutdown.

“I’m very grateful that the government has reopened,” said Mitra. But they haven’t gotten paid yet, she added.

As President Donald Trump and congressional leaders announced an agreement to reopen the government for three weeks, affected workers in the Houston area expressed relief tempered by concern that the shutdown might resume. And some of the programs that have emerged to assist furloughed federal workers continued to provide help as the employees wait for the back pay they’ve been promised.

For example, Harris County’s Women, Infants and Children Centers will continue offering free food to federal workers for now, said Jolene Norbert-Harrell, the program’s director. The benefit cards are available to qualified parents.

“At this moment we are still open for business and any federal employee who has been affected by the shutdown, if they came in today or tomorrow are still eligible to apply to receive benefits,” Norbert-Harrell said Friday. “Now, after they receive their back pay that they’re discussing, that may change things as far as their income, but up until that point they’re still welcome to come.”

An estimated 35,000 people in the Houston area, and 800,000 nationwide, were affected by the shutdown. As workers approached their second missed paycheck, nonprofits offered help. Restaurants and banks provided free or discounted services.

“The ones furloughed are typically the least-paid (federal) employees,” said Bill Baldwin, who started the Houston Relief Fund during Hurricane Harvey. The team used its network and foundation to help others after subsequent natural disasters and the shutdown.

“Everyone was thinking (the shutdown) was going to end in week two or three — when you get past 30 days it get more and more severe,” Baldwin said.

Donations for furloughed workers continued to trickle in even after the deal was announced.

Debbie Fuqua, 54, a physical therapist, and her co-workers collected diapers, wipes and lotion for affected employees with infants. Fuqua dropped the items off Friday afternoon at the Helping Hands center near George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

“I work for Texas Children’s in the Clear Lake area and we wanted to do something to help out so we just decided since we work with children we do something to help children,” said Fuqua.

For Mitra, 27, who works on space suits for NASA, Friday’s news promised to relieve a serious financial burden. She’s young, with little savings, and just uprooted her life in Mississippi to take a job in Houston about two months ago.

And then the shutdown happened. Mitra and about 2,800 of her colleagues at the Johnson Space Center — 94 percent of the federal workforce here — have been out of work since Dec. 22 when the federal government was shuttered because of a political battle over the proposed border wall.

The temporary nature of the deal announced Friday — and Trump’s warning that he might shut down federal agencies again unless he gets funds for a wall at the U.S.-Mexican border — has Mitra worried.

Their jobs “shouldn’t constantly be taken away from us and we shouldn’t be used as pawns,” Mitra said. The short-term deal “introduces instability to our lives.”

Several NASA employees echoed those concerns.

Holly Griffith, a safety engineer at Johnson, is primarily worried about her work on Orion, the spacecraft being built to take humans back to the moon for the first time since the Apollo era in the 1960s and 1970s.

She fears it will be impossible to catch up on a month-long hiatus from work, thereby delaying the project even further. The program already has experienced significant setbacks in its quest to take humans back to the moon for the first time since the Apollo era in the 1960s and early 1970s.

“Going back to work … will be difficult, too, because you can’t just pick up where you left off,” she said. “You have to get everything restarted and then at the end of three weeks you might have to shut it down again.”

Johnson is home to the nation’s astronaut corps, where human space flight research and training take place. It also is home to the International Space Station’s mission operations and the Orion program. Only about 200 federal employees kept working during the shutdown to keep the astronauts on the space station safe, though they were not getting paid.

“At the end of the day, I don’t really know anybody who can work for a month without pay,” said Marina Guerra, a supervisor with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Houston and volunteer with the Houston Relief Fund. “To degrade or belittle people because they didn’t have savings, or say they can go get another job — that’s not helpful. For a lot of people this is their dream job, it’s where they’ve put their life behind.”

The shutdown lasted so long, those working without pay were asked to clean bathrooms because the custodial staff was cut in half as the shutdown dragged on.

Byron Williams, Houston-area labor representative for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said he was “elated” that the shutdown had ended, if only temporarily. Williams represents about 200 contractors at Johnson, including the custodial staff.

“It’s a pretty good day today,” Williams said.

But the short-term nature of the deal creates uncertainty that keeps Shaun Azimi, a robotics engineer at Johnson, up at night.

“It seems like we could be furloughed again next month,” he said. “I’m worried about my future and that of my colleagues. I am also worried that talented and dedicated young people may be less inclined to work for the federal government as a result of these shutdowns.”

Massarah Mikati and McKenzie Misiaszek contributed to this report.

alex.stuckey@chron.com