(C) Minnesota Reformer This story was originally published by Minnesota Reformer and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Federal shutdown furloughs thousands of Minnesota workers • Minnesota Reformer [1] ['Madison Mcvan', 'Michelle Griffith', 'Tim Henderson', 'More From Author', 'October', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar'] Date: 2025-10-01 A federal government shutdown has Minnesota’s 18,000 civilian federal workers facing furloughs, reassignments, work without pay and threats of being fired. Republicans need a handful of Democratic votes in the GOP-controlled Senate to overcome a filibuster and pass a spending bill to keep the lights on. Democrats, spurred on by a restive grassroots base, want concessions on the massive health care cuts Republicans passed in July. Republicans have refused. For now, that means all but the most essential services — airport security, food inspection, weather alerts, law enforcement — have been shuttered. The shutdown comes after months of attacks on federal workers by President Donald Trump and allies including Elon Musk, who ordered the termination of thousands of government employees and offered buyouts to 2 million workers. (Litigation is ongoing over the legality of the firings; many workers have been hired back.) The constant denigration of the federal workforce had already lowered morale; now, a shutdown is making things worse — and federal employees are afraid to speak out, said Ruark Hotopp, national vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees for the district including Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. Federal workers in Minnesota do everything from data collection and processing of funding applications to park maintenance and management of the electrical grid. Don’t expect to hear too much from them, however: Directives from federal agency leaders say workers are subject to discipline for speaking with the press or posting about their jobs on personal social media accounts, Hotopp said. Even the union is having some difficulty understanding what’s happening at various agencies. “Getting accurate information out of agencies is really difficult at the moment, because they’ve put gag orders and they’ve terrified everybody — so it’s kind of a hostage situation,” Hotopp said. President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March instructing agencies to terminate their union contracts. Unions immediately sued, and a district judge on Tuesday ruled the president overstepped his authority. While the lawsuit is underway, agencies have decided to unilaterally cancel collective bargaining agreements. At the same time, agencies are icing out union representatives, Hotopp said, making gathering data on furloughs, reassignments and firings more difficult. Some agencies still have some leftover funding available from the last stopgap funding bill, so some federal workers are working with pay for the time being. Others, like the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, where Hotopp works, are reassigning workers from positions that are funded through congressional appropriations to jobs that are funded by uninterrupted sources of funding, like the fees people pay on citizenship and visa applications. In some cases, Hotopp said, that means placing people in jobs that they didn’t agree to, and aren’t trained for. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the departments of Education, Commerce, Labor and Housing and Urban Development have all furloughed more than 70% of their workers, according to a New York Times tracker. [END] --- [1] Url: https://minnesotareformer.com/2025/10/01/federal-shutdown-furloughs-thousands-of-minnesota-workers/ Published and (C) by Minnesota Reformer Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/MnReformer/