Updated October 10, 2025 at 6:51 AM MDT
As the government shutdown stretches into its second week, hundreds of thousands of federal workers are not working — and more are not getting paid. The White House has thrown into question whether some will ever be made whole.
Still, for the first time in awhile, Monica Gorman is upbeat.
"I'm feeling energized, honestly," says Gorman. "It's felt for so long to me like federal workers have just been screaming into a void."
Gorman works at NASA and is a member of the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers (IFPTE). She spoke in her personal capacity and not on behalf of the government.
Long before Congress failed to pass a funding bill, the Trump administration essentially started shutting down the government bit by bit, Gorman says. At NASA, entire offices have been shuttered, including her own at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. She had been using data science to predict the cost of future NASA missions.
Due to cuts proposed in Trump's budget request, she was reassigned to a new position working on a lunar communications project. Her first day was supposed to be Oct. 1 — the same day the government shut down.
Now, the shutdown has given her hope that some in Congress may be willing to assert their Constitutional authority over spending and push back against some of the sweeping cuts.
"To see people in Congress taking a harder line, I feel like we're finally being heard now in a way that we weren't before," she says.
"I'm done being afraid"
Even as the government shutdown has brought financial and emotional stress to federal workers and their families, it's also given a boost to some who see the standoff in Congress as an opportunity to get the word out that things are not okay.
Nine months into President Trump's second term, Gorman and other federal workers tell NPR they are coming together to strategize, talk to reporters, meet with members of Congress and sound the alarm about everything the government has already lost: institutional knowledge, funding for vital services, the means for holding officials accountable.
Fear of retaliation by the Trump administration has left many federal employees reluctant to speak on the record with NPR. But now?
"I'm done being afraid of them," Gorman says. She believes many others are too. "They say the best organizer is a bad boss, and we all have the same bad boss."
NPR asked the White House for a response to the criticism coming from some civil servants. In a statement, spokeswoman Abigail Jackson wrote: "President Trump was elected by a resounding majority of Americans to carry out the agenda he is implementing. Federal workers who are actively resisting the Trump agenda are, in reality, working against the American people who elected the President."
Connecting with others for support and information
Sarah Kobrin, who has worked at the National Cancer Institute for nearly 22 years, says the Trump administration's repeated attacks on the federal workforce have brought government workers closer.
"They have made us much, much stronger," she says, speaking in her personal capacity.
Kobrin says she has met all kinds of people in other agencies and around the country. They've been forced by the Trump administration to turn to each other for information about the administration's latest directives — and for support.
Earlier this year, Kobrin faced the difficult task of calling grantees to inform them that their research funding had been terminated. She'd been told her area of expertise — uptake of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine — was not a priority of the current administration. With so much of her work hobbled, she now refuses to stay silent.
"I see the dismantling of the government and the scientific enterprise, specifically, and must speak," she says.
Still, in a workforce of more than 2 million people, Kobrin acknowledges that not all federal workers are weathering the shutdown and the turmoil of the past nine months the same way.
"I know there is certainly a wide variety of what people need. How afraid they are, how stable they feel," she says. "It's hard not to be paranoid under the current circumstances."
With unions sidelined, grassroots employee networks grow
Earlier this year, President Trump issued an executive order ending collective bargaining rights for most federal employees, citing national security concerns even at agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Weather Service. That executive order faces multiple lawsuits.
Also targeted were unions representing employees at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), including a local chapter of the National Federation of Federal Employees that was led by Stephanie Rice, an employee of BLM based in Alaska.
With the union's future looking dim, Rice began looking for other ways to connect with federal workers and discovered the Federal Unionists Network, the group that Gorman is also a part of.
Now, from her base in Anchorage, Rice has been able to stay engaged and informed, even with little information coming through official channels.
"This sort of crowdsourcing across the country, with everyone saying, 'I saw this. What have you heard?'… has been really useful," she says, speaking in her personal capacity.
Before her time in Alaska, Rice served for six years in the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations. She's devoted her entire adult life to public service.
"I believe very strongly that my job as a civil servant is to carry out the lawful instructions of the sitting administration, regardless of whether I think it's a good policy," she says. "That's my job, and I did it under the first Trump administration."
But this time, she believes the administration is acting lawlessly, including by sidelining the unions.
"The time for us to stand up and do something about it is now. We might not get another opportunity," she says.
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