This is the third time the government has shut down in the last year and — unless President Donald Trump drops his demand for a border wall — everything from the national parks to the National Science Foundation could be closing up shop again on Feb. 16.

In the face of all that, America’s federal workers are thinking twice about their careers — and that’s bad for workers and the country.

Historically, the federal government (and public service writ large) has been a pretty good place to work. Not only does it allow people to serve their country (which many are keen on), it is the kind of quality job that all people should have. There is stability. There are retirement benefits. There is health care. There is paid leave. There is pay transparency. There is a union.

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Due in large part to the fact that the federal government has offered stable opportunities for advancement and a secure job with a steady paycheck, the federal workforce has disproportionately attracted people of color and people with disabilities. The latest data show that people of color are overrepresented in the federal government: More than 18 percent of workers in the federal government are black (compared to about 11 percent of the overall labor force) and Native Americans are more than one-and-a-half times as likely to work for the federal government than be in the overall labor force. Fourteen percent of full-time federal workers are people with disabilities, compared to 3.8 percent in the overall labor force. Veterans, who comprise nearly a third of the federal government, are also disproportionately represented.

But while federal jobs tick many of the job-quality boxes, satisfaction has been declining. The latest data reveal that morale at the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services fell by more than 10 percentage points between 2017 and 2018, and morale at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau dropped by an astounding 25 percentage points.

One can only imagine what basement these numbers would be in if the survey happened this week.

This decline is likely due in no small part to the fact that attacks on federal workers have been mounting in recent years. Their work has been condescendingly dismissed by Trump, and National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow referred to their unpaid efforts during the shutdown as “volunteering.” They have been asked to work with fewer staff due to hiring freezes and for diminishing wages due to Republican-pushed pay freezes.

Public sector unions have come under attack, both by Trump and the Supreme Court. And now workers have literally been forced to make do without pay, while many have still been having to show up and clock in. More and more work is being shifted to contractors who have fewer protections and who will likely not even be paid for the time they could not work during the shutdown. (Contractor satisfaction, which is likely even lower, deserves a whole article unto itself.)

Is it any wonder there have been reports of federal workers departing government service?

This could spell trouble, not just for the workers themselves who deserve far more than to be pawns in Trump’s racist game of chicken with the economy, but for our country in general. Reduced employee morale can lead to lower productivity — not a good thing when you’re trying to run a business, much less a country. We’ve also seen what it looks like when we don’t sufficiently invest in public services: lines get longer, corporations get away with defrauding the American people, and people die waiting for the services and benefits they need.

And if Trump’s divisiveness leads to less diversity within the workforce, the evidence indicates that could be bad for the public, too, because it matters who our public servants are. Research finds that having a diverse public labor force is important for the consideration of the interests of people of color in a range of circumstances.  For example, having more black and Latino bureaucrats is related to having more Latinos and blacks judged eligible for rural housing loans. Having a larger share of black federal workers in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is positively related to the number of discrimination claims filed by black workers.

There are high costs to everyone when we treat federal workers like disposable widgets — and in the wake of the shutdown we may find out exactly how high they are.

The longest government shutdown in history has rendered many federal agricultural services unavailable, including the thousands of Farm Service Agency (FSA) offices that assist farmers with dozens of programs, such as disaster relief and annual farm operating loans. This is the time of year when Nestler and Beltram should be working with their FSA officer to prepare their annual loan packet — but with the office closed and their officer furloughed (and prohibited from using work cell phones or email to respond to farmers), they’ve had no choice but to wait.

“Usually by now we’re far enough down the road that we know the loan is going to get processed,” said Beltram. “But right now, we don’t have those assurances, because we haven’t been able to communicate with [the FSA].” With spring just around the corner, every week counts. Last year, they applied for their loan on Jan. 1 and received their funds five weeks later, on Feb. 6.

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Last week, some FSA offices re-opened for a three-day period to work solely on existing loans and 1099 tax form preparation for borrowers, as those forms are due on Jan. 31. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue also announced that FSA offices would reopen on Jan. 24 for two weeks, and would offer “a longer list of transactions” for farmers, including operating loans. At the end of two weeks, if the government has still not reopened, FSA offices will move to a three-day work week schedule. All FSA employees will work without pay until the government re-opens.

Even with these measures, and even if the government does re-open soon, the damage has already been done. “I mean, if I’m reading the tea leaves, the best case scenario is they’re going to show up on the 24th with a huge backlog of stuff to do … and we’re not going to get our loan near on time,” said Beltram.

In fiscal year 2018, the USDA loaned a total of $5.4 billion, which helped farmers buy property, equipment, and necessary inputs, such as seeds and fertilizer — all of which are vital to farm operations and also prop up small rural economies.

Take tomatoes. At the beginning of February, Beltram and Nestler order seedlings from a local greenhouse, which requires a 50 percent deposit. By mid-March, they’ll begin fertilizing and prepping their fields, and seedlings will be transplanted in mid-May. They’ll spend money on inputs — fertilizer, irrigation and field supplies, fuel for their vehicles, shipping boxes, and labor — for tomato plants that won’t mature to generate revenue until mid-August. That’s at least six months without cash from sales.

“So every spring, we go to our lender, which is the FSA, and they loan us operating funds to put our crop in the ground,” said Beltram. “It’s the way farming has always been. … If you weren’t working with the bank 100 years ago, you were going to the general store and buying everything on credit until your crops came in.”

Factoring in costs for their entire 60-acre farm (which also includes organic leafy greens), Beltram estimates they’ll need $200,000 just in establishment costs, before they even think about harvest.

As they purchase their supplies and pay their employees, those funds naturally ripple out to others in the community. But the shutdown has brought this seasonal farm economy to a halt, freezing out farm families and small businesses already on the brink.

The shutdown situation also exacerbates a rough few years in farm country. In November, the USDA projected that net farm income would decline by $10.8 billion (14.1 percent) in 2018 — just 3.3 percent above the 2016 level, which was the lowest since 2002. As a result, the United States is losing farms in an eerie echo of the 1980s farm crisis, an economic disaster that upended rural America. In Wisconsin alone, 638 dairy farms closed up shop in 2018. Adding to the problems, President Donald Trump’s trade war made pawns out of commodity farmers, resulting in retaliatory tariffs that had sweeping and disastrous effects.

“Had [President Trump] set out to ruin America’s small farmers, he could hardly have come up with a more effective, potentially ruinous one-two combination punch than tariffs and the shutdown,” wrote Iowa radio news director Robert Leonard in a New York Times op-ed.

Climate change brought extreme weather to farm country as well. In North Carolina, Hurricane Florence was estimated to cost farmers more than $1 billion in damage and loss. And over the course of the season, Nestler and Beltram received more than 100 inches of rain (Asheville’s annual average is 45 inches), which caused massive flooding and wiped out 30 percent of their entire crop.

“It was the worst year we’ve ever had at the farm, financially,” said Beltram. “I don’t know any farmers in this area that have money sitting around right now. Everybody I know either broke even or lost money this year.” And then came the shutdown: He knows farmers who can’t pay their rent, buy groceries, or pay for day care because of the effect the government’s closure has had on their finances.

Beltram and Nestler plan to head to the FSA office as soon as it re-opens, but don’t expect to get their loan funds until mid-March, at best. In the meantime, they’ll go to the bank to apply for a bridge loan, and are considering the possibility of cash advances from credit cards until their FSA loan can be processed.

“I’ve been farming long enough that I can’t sweat things too much. I just have to have faith that it’s all going to work out,” Beltram said. “But there’s no question that our livelihood is seriously threatened by what’s going on.”

This year, the renewal process has been made even harder by the partial government shutdown, which accelerated deadlines with no notice for the more than 40 million people who receive benefits. And that’s just one of the effects the shutdown has had on SNAP and other nutrition assistance programs.

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On Jan. 8, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that February SNAP benefits would be distributed by Jan. 20, in order to get around shutdown-related restrictions. That called for a herculean effort: Millions of new applications and recertifications that would normally be due in February now need to be submitted by mid-January. Normally, new applications and annual recertifications take place on a rolling basis. For recipients who couldn’t gather supporting material in time or didn’t know about the deadline, such as furloughed federal workers hoping for nutrition assistance while they remain without pay, the time to file for benefits has already come and gone.

At the same time, some grocers have stopped accepting SNAP because the government shutdown means they cannot renew their licenses. As the shutdown continues, the number of vendors will dwindle, a particular issue for people in areas with limited options.

The effects of these problems are wide-reaching. Nearly half of SNAP recipients are children, and LGBTQ people, along with disabled people, are much more likely to need nutrition assistance.

States administer the SNAP program, and the state-by-state chaos has been frustrating. “I have not received any update from the state’s human resource department about how this would affect us. In every other instance of benefit changes, we are sent copious written notification(s),” another recipient told TalkPoverty via email. Documentation also sometimes contradicted itself, adding even more uncertainty to the process.

Others reported that they heard about the deadline from news stories or Facebook, and struggled to get answers from officials in local offices — many of which set different deadlines, making it difficult to determine when applications and renewals needed to be submitted. At least one recipient read on social media that SNAP benefits distribution would be reversed if agencies ran out of money, something that shouldn’t be possible with EBT cards. Confusion and fear like this are familiar for many low-income people, who sometimes feel at the whims of capricious government policies and procedures.

“I’ll push myself not to use [benefits distributed early] until February but there’s a fear they could be taken away. Everything just seems so uncertain. Poor people know to use what we have when we have it because we can’t depend on what will be there in the future,” said one SNAP recipient.

SNAP is not the only nutrition assistance program with funding thrown into uncertainty by the shutdown. Also threatened are the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, which supplies benefits to 7 million pregnant people, new parents, infants, and children, and the Food Distribution Program in Native American communities, which fed over 90,000 people a month in 2017. The latter adds to the shutdown-induced woes — which include limitations on access to health care — in Native communities. The national free and reduced-price lunch program, which feeds more than 30 million kids annually, could also be in danger if the shutdown persists into March.

Even after the government reopens, the danger isn’t over, thanks to a dangerous Trump administration proposal to make work requirements even harsher in SNAP, which Congress explicitly refused to do in the latest Farm Bill. Currently, 33 states and Washington, D.C. have waivers in place for high unemployment areas to relieve the strict time limits for so-called “able-bodied adults without dependents” written into SNAP in 1996, which restrict benefits eligibility to three months out of every three years for those considered “able-bodied” with no legal dependents. The Trump administration wants to sharply curtail states’ flexibility to use these waivers, throwing 755,000 under- and unemployed people off SNAP.

“I don’t have contingency plans because I can’t have any,” says a disabled SNAP recipient in Colorado who struggled to get an answer about her recertification documents, normally due in February. Members of low-income communities have extensive experience creating their own safety nets to support each other through hard times, but “I think that people are going to get burnt out and stretched too thin by all the need that surrounds them.”

Editor’s note: This post has been updated to clarify the Trump administration proposal on SNAP work requirements and the current status of work requirement waivers.

Delayed refunds are indeed a big concern, especially for those low-income Americans who depend on their yearly tax refund to make ends meet, and who tend to file their returns first. But in many ways, delayed refunds are a status quo issue for poorer households, along with a host of other problems brought about by bad IRS policy and shortchanged IRS budgets. For low-income Americans, the IRS doesn’t work even when the government is fully open for business.

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For starters, as the IRS Taxpayer Advocate Service – which is the public’s representative at the agency – wrote in its latest report to Congress, the IRS is not doing enough for the tens of millions of people who don’t have reliable internet access. If those people want to call the IRS to get help with their taxes, instead of using the website, odds are they won’t get to speak to anyone. The Taxpayer Advocate Service estimated that, in fiscal year 2018, 60 percent of attempts to receive live assistance from the agency over the phone would fail.

To its credit, the IRS does offer free in-person tax prep to low-income people via the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program and the Taxpayer Counseling for the Elderly program – VITA and TCE, respectively. 90 percent of those eligible for the former program make less than $54,000 per year. However, likely due to problems regarding publicity, locations, and inability to take time off to meet with a VITA volunteer, very few eligible households can take advantage of these services. Of the 108 million individual tax filers in 2017 who were eligible for the programs, just 3.5 million successfully had their taxes submitted.

Most people, instead, turn to paid tax prep, paying a fee to do something that should be free and easy. According to the Tax Policy Center, more than half of households earning less than $30,000 annually use paid tax prep, which costs an average of $176 for a basic federal and state return.

In return for that money, they receive more potential problems: Tax preparers are more likely to make a mistake than households who do their taxes themselves, and are especially bad, per a 2014 Government Accountability Office study, at correctly calculating the Earned Income Tax Credit, which specifically goes to lower-income households. Of course, those households are the least able to absorb an IRS penalty for improper filing.

The big tax prep companies, in partnership with the IRS, do offer up free filing to people who qualify, usually on the basis of low incomes, but those programs are hard to navigate and full of tricks that push people into paid filing systems. Many states also don’t allow free filing programs at all for their own state-level income taxes. Only 3 percent of people eligible for free private filing programs actually use them, and most don’t come back to repeat the experience the following year.

While the IRS has not been making it easier for low-income people to pay their taxes, there is one way that it has been giving them special attention: fraud investigations. Last year, more than one-third of IRS audits were of taxpayers eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, which for a single filer with no children can only be claimed if you make less than $15,000. Those receiving the EITC are audited at twice the rate of wealthy Americans who make between $200,000-$500,000.

Having a return flagged for audit can mean all sorts of hassles, even if it turns out nothing was done wrong, which is the most likely outcome. Between January and October last year, non-identity theft refund fraud at the IRS has a false positive rate of 81 percent, meaning more than 8 in 10 refunds flagged by auditors showed no evidence of fraud after they were investigated. And good luck to anyone who calls the IRS, actually reaches a live person, and wants to know why their return has been labeled as problematic: IRS customer service reps don’t have access to the non-identity fraud case management system.

Such flagging can mean a long wait for a refund even if the fraud charge was unfounded. More than one-third of the people who were flagged improperly in 2017 had to wait 11 weeks or more to receive their money.

These problems are not the fault of the IRS staff. The issue is that conservatives have intentionally starved it of funds. The 2018 IRS budget was $2.5 billion below what was spent on the agency in 2010, adjusted for inflation – a decline of 18 percent. Over and over, the IRS has been asked to do more with less; its budget has been lower than the previous year every year since 2010, save for one. Tax prep companies also have a stake in the status quo – as more difficult taxes mean more fees – and they lobby accordingly. H&R Block and Intuit spent about $3 million and $2 million respectively last year on a variety of bills, some of which would have made paying taxes easier, such as the Tax Filing Simplification Act of 2017.

It’s undoubtedly a bad thing that the IRS – and the rest of the government – is partially shut down. But even at the best of times, the agency doesn’t work for low-income Americans. Simply opening the doors again won’t change that.

As federal worker Sam Shirazi noted on Twitter, the shutdown has created a child care emergency for some families: “I’m a furloughed Federal employee, but the #GovernmentShutdown doesn’t just affect me. My daughter’s daycare is in the Commerce Dept and is closed during the shutdown, but we still have to pay our weekly invoice.”

Nearly 100 child care centers serving federal employees, along with some civilians, operate across the U.S. The spaces are leased by the General Services Administration, which pays $5.6 billion in rent every year. According to the GSA, nearly 7,500 children receive care each day at such facilities, approximately two thirds of whom are children of federal employees. The facilities run on parent fees; the service is not provided by the government.

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Even more child care centers provide services directly through government agencies, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, which maintains on-site child care for staffers and a limited number of civilians at locations like its Maryland campus. NASA also provides on-site child care to employees.

Federal workers and the civilians who take advantage of these services have come to count on them, and the child care providers who staff them rely on their wages to support their own families. During the shutdown, parents and workers alike are struggling to make ends meet, whether they’re civilians suddenly without child care, federal employees who remain working but have nowhere for their children to go, or child care workers uncertain about their pay status.

In GSA spaces or federal agencies that remain open, child care centers are operating as usual, though some reported declines in attendance, with federal workers keeping their enrolled children home. Others, like Shirazi’s Commerce Kids, are closed, forcing parents to look elsewhere for child care. Some are operating in GSA buildings with skeleton crews, like the Growing Years Child Development Center in Washington, where the GSA personnel who assist with building maintenance and safety concerns have all been furloughed. The precise number of facilities closed is unclear; many weren’t answering phones or responding to messages.

Many administrators are making the decision to pay child care providers who have been affected by involuntary leave in order to retain them, whether they are employees of nonprofits operating with a memorandum of understanding in GSA spaces or staffers at contract companies. abby, a civilian parent in Colorado, says “the teachers are definitely more poor than the parents,” and can ill-afford unpaid leave. Despite their low pay, they are highly-skilled workers who “could all find new jobs” if they chose to start looking.

To keep paying staffers, centers are still collecting fees from parents, even those who are furloughed without pay, though some are offering discounts and tuition assistance. This means some parents are paying twice: Once to the facility their children normally go to, which is currently closed, and again to whoever is filling in the gap during the shutdown.

Cathy Bisaillon, president and CEO of Easterseals Washington, the program provider at Growing Years, comments that nonprofit child cares run on very slim margins, making it hard to waive or reduce tuition fees, even though their office is sympathetic to and concerned about families like those in the Coast Guard who are currently on furlough. Lack of communication from the government is also complicating matters; she expressed concerns about Head Start funding, even though the program is funded through the Department of Health and Human Services, which remains unaffected by the shutdown.

Whether furloughed or ordered to work without pay, federal employees have child care fees to add to long lists of expenses for households that live paycheck to paycheck. And in the case of those working without pay who have children in closed facilities, there’s a scramble to meet child care needs as they report for work. For civilians who have relied on federal child care for their young children, the shutdown is creating uncertainty and frustration as they game out child care arrangements, uncertain about when the shutdown will end.

Child care administrators are sending out bulletins suggesting parents find college students on break or consider paying center staff for in-home care. Parents are frantically seeking spots in other facilities, or working out care arrangements with friends and family on a day-by-day basis. Those with flex time or paid leave are using it, and some are simply taking their children to work with them, for lack of a better option.

NASA engineer Jessica M reported on Twitter that her child care is raising rates to offset the costs of the shutdown. Some parents have child care access but can’t afford it because of the furlough, so they’re pulling their kids out and hoping they don’t lose their spaces in facilities that often have lengthy waiting lists.

According to the Center for American Progress’ Early Childhood team — one of whom is among the DC-area parents struggling to meet child care needs due to a facility closure — “licensed infant and toddler child care is unaffordable for most families.” While child care subsidies are available, only 1 in 6 eligible families are currently receiving them. Washington, DC, which has been hit especially hard by the shutdown, has particularly high child care costs; parents need to spend 21 percent of the area’s median income on center-based care that meets licensing requirements. Maryland and Virginia both have high costs, and a high concentration of federal employees, as well.

The price tag for child care isn’t the only problem, as many parents affected by the shutdown are discovering. There’s also a significant shortage of available spots and providers; among parents who can afford to pay tuition at a shuttered center and pay for other arrangements, some, like abby, are learning that there are no other arrangements available.

In a painful juxtaposition, at the precise moment that parents affected by the shutdown are desperate for childcare, Congress has just opened a state-of-the-art care facility for the children of staffers. Limited child care options, you see, had been driving staffers away from Capitol Hill.