About 3.4K Nevadans not getting paid during government shutdown

CARSON CITY — About 30 percent of the roughly 11,000 federal workers employed with Cabinet-level agencies in Nevada are going without paychecks as the partial government shutdown grinds through its second week, a Washington think tank estimates.

The progressive Center for American Progress calculated nationwide and state-by-state furlough totals based on employment numbers at agencies funded by seven appropriations bills that did not pass last month. Among those affected are the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Interior, Housing & Urban Development, and Transportation.

More than half of the affected employees in Nevada work for the Department of Interior, and half of that group are in the Bureau of Land Management.

The Democratic National Committee pushed out the center’s Dec. 21 estimates in news releases Wednesday.

Nationwide, just more than 473,000 federal workers are furloughed or working without pay during the shutdown, according to CAP’s estimates. Nevada’s contingent represents 0.7 percent of the overall total and ranks 36th among the states and the District of Columbia. The state ranks 32nd in population.

Drilling deeper into Nevada’s numbers based on federal employee records shows that of roughly 3,450 potentially affected workers, nearly 2,100 are Interior Department employees, including 929 BLM workers, 601 in the Bureau of Reclamation, 260 in the National Parks Service, and 97 in the EPA.

A representative of the labor union that represents federal employees confirmed, however, that Bureau of Reclamation personnel are working and being paid.

Other groups affected include 301 USDA Forest Service workers and 321 FAA workers in the Department of Transportation. In the Department of Homeland Security, 100 FEMA workers, 66 TSA workers, 16 ICE workers are affected, as are 82 Census workers and 70 NOAA workers who are under the Department of Commerce.

Unaffected by the shutdown furloughs are more than 2,400 Department of Defense employees in the state — including Air Force, Army and Navy personnel — and 4,800 Veterans Affairs workers.

After previous federal government shutdowns, furloughed employees have been retroactively paid for the time they were forced to miss.

This story has been updated to note that Nevada-based Interior Department workers with the Bureau of Reclamation are not among the furloughed federal employees.

Contact Bill Dentzer at bdentzer@reviewjournal.com or 775-461-0661. Follow @Dentzernews on Twitter.