Federal employees working without pay during Donald Trump's holiday government shutdown are saying that, for many reasons, they may soon start panicking.
"This one feels different," Celia Hanh, a TSA officer who is working without pay, told the New York Times.
Hanh, who works at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, said that if the shutdown "were to go about two weeks, that’s when people would start panicking."
After losing a number of items she owned in an Alaska earthquake earlier this year, furloughed Bureau of Indian Affairs probate specialist Dena Ivey has been forced to grapple with "the man-made disaster now afflicting her family," the Times reported.
“We’re sort of being held hostage in the middle, and we have families and obligations,” Ivey, a single mother, told the newspaper. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make rent.”
The Anchorage-based BIA official added: “I’m basically living on credit now.”
"We have to grin and bear it," said Charles Aitken, a Federal Emergency Management Agency inventory manager who is still working in Virginia without pay. The report added that Aitken recently informed his ex-wife that he may be late paying child support.
The Washington Post also reported Friday night that Coast Guardsmen are also left hanging in the balance amid the shutdown -- and that some are calling it a "crisis."
Read the entire report via the Times.