It’s official: This is now the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.
The government closure dragged into its 36th day Wednesday, shattering the record set during the last Trump administration for the longest shutdown ever. And there’s little indication this one will end anytime soon.
Federal workers across the government are furloughed, missing paychecks and unsure whether they’ll get back pay after White House suggestions that it’s not a sure thing.
The impacts of the shutdown have been uneven across the government — including at energy and environmental agencies — as the administration has found cash to keep some programs funded and officials have prioritized some favored projects over others. Some energy and environmental work has stopped entirely, while other projects are expected to grind to a halt as funding dries up.
Meanwhile, Democrats’ big wins in off-year elections Tuesday could shift the political calculus as the stalemate continues. Congressional Democratic leaders, emboldened by Tuesday’s results, kicked off the day Wednesday with their latest demand for a bipartisan meeting with President Donald Trump to talk about the shutdown.
Here’s what the longest shutdown looks like at energy and environmental agencies on day 36:
Interior Department
Despite roughly 29,000 Interior Department employees on furlough since Oct. 1, the department has barreled ahead with Trump priorities, including energy development.
That has included reopening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling and issuing more than 600 drilling permits across public lands.
But elsewhere the shutdown has frozen normal business. Interior has missed court appearances and is losing an estimated $1 million a day in revenue that national parks usually collect during the busy fall season.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum sent an email Friday commiserating with the department’s furloughed staff.
“Whether you serve in the field, in regional offices, or here in Washington, your absence is felt,” he wrote.
The note comes on the heels of Burgum making several statements to the media characterizing the shutdown as an opportunity for the Trump administration to cut costs. Burgum was planning to lay off more than 2,000 department employees, but that agenda was temporarily blocked by a federal judge. Department officials said Tuesday they will no longer pursue layoffs during the shutdown.
Some critics have taken Burgum to task for advancing energy projects and visiting an oil summit in the United Arab Emirates and an energy gathering in Bahrain during the lapse in federal funds.
“Approving more than 600 drilling permits and dozens of new leases while parks operate with skeleton crews shows this shutdown is being used to benefit oil and gas executives at the expense of our public lands,” Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement.
Bureau of Land Management
Interior’s Bureau of Land Management has continued to work on big-ticket items, such as a suite of policy directives opening hundreds of thousands of acres in Alaska to drilling, as well as smaller-scale moves like planned oil and gas lease sales, timber harvests, and mining permits.
Burgum announced last month that he was signing an order to reopen the coastal plain of ANWR to drilling, reversing the Biden administration’s halt on development.
He also announced that the agency is advancing construction of the 211-mile-long Ambler mining road to provide access to a remote mining district in northwestern Alaska.
Mining of critical minerals has remained a priority during the shutdown, and the bureau Monday approved the expansion of a barite ore mine in northeastern Nevada. In that case, the bureau used a streamlined permitting process, following the president’s call to shorten environmental reviews of simpler projects to 14 days.
BLM also announced this week it would hold an oil and gas lease sale in January involving parcels in Montana and North Dakota. That lease sale is now open for a 30-day public protest period.
Fish and Wildlife Service
While oil, gas and mineral permitting barrels forward, agencies including the Fish and Wildlife Service have missed court-set or statutory deadlines for action.
Environmental groups, for instance, have been pressing the Trump administration on allegations that officials ignored the National Environmental Policy Act when the state of Florida constructed an immigrant detention facility near the Everglades National Park.
Citing the shutdown, government attorneys convinced the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to extend an important brief-filing deadline originally set for late October.
“The Department of Justice does not know when such funding will be restored by Congress,” DOJ attorneys advised the appellate court.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, too, has missed various deadlines set under legal settlements, including a decision whether to list the Bornean earless monitor as threatened or endangered and finalizing critical habitat for the endangered rusty patched bumble bee.
“The agency is starved of the money and staff needed to meet those deadlines,” said Jake Li, a former FWS official who is now vice president of conservation policy at Defenders of Wildlife. “Long before the shutdown, FWS struggled with this problem daily, and now it’s amplified multifold.”
National parks
The National Park Service has attracted significant public attention amid the shutdown, with more than 9,000 park staffers furloughed. The Trump administration ordered parks to remain mostly accessible to the public, tapping recreation fees to pay skeleton crews for cleaning. Those crews haven’t stopped some illegal activity spiking in parks, such as parachuters in Yosemite.
Some conservation groups, worried about damage to facilities, urged visitors to stay home during the peak fall foliage that drives the highest visitation days of the year for some parks.
Private groups and local governments have secured funds to pay national park staff in some cases, as a stopgap until the government reopens. West Virginia secured cash to keep Harpers Ferry National Historical Park and the New River George National Park and Preserve open. Similar efforts supported Muir Woods National Monument in California and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina. States have helped pay for parks in previous shutdowns as well, but those arrangements have sometimes sparked discord over whether states should be repaid.
Parks without outside funding have been burning through their fee funds to keep facilities partially staffed. As long as the shutdown lasts, the agency is also losing new revenue to replace that money, because parks can’t collect fees during the shutdown. They are bleeding roughly $1 million per day from uncollected entrance and recreation fees, according to the National Parks Conservation Association.
EPA
EPA has managed to stay open during the shutdown, but its operations are slowly grinding to a halt.
Tapping carryover funds, the agency has adopted an unusual “phased” approach to furloughs. Consequently, employees working on Trump administration priorities, such as drafting rule rollbacks and approving permits, remain on the job while others have been sent home.
That has spiked anxiety among staffers who don’t know if they will receive a paycheck or furlough notice during the funding lapse, according to EPA employees granted anonymity because they fear retaliation.
One agency staffer said managers have been unable to answer questions about who will be sent home and when. “Headquarters is basically flying by the seat of their pants, but we all knew that already,” they said.
On the eve of this shutdown, essentially all staffers received an unsigned email to report to work for the time being. Furloughs, however, have now spread across the agency through its program offices and regional branches.
American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, EPA’s largest union, conducted an internal survey of EPA employees two weeks ago, and 60 percent of roughly 1,000 respondents said they were furloughed. In turn, the union estimates that 6,000 to 7,000 EPA employees have been sent home during the shutdown.
Administrator Lee Zeldin has said EPA’s biggest wave of furloughs came last month, capturing 4,000 employees. He has warned that another round is coming as the shutdown lingers.
“A total lapse of funding is an 89 percent reduction of our agency, which means that a lot of the president’s priorities, the American public’s priorities, wouldn’t be able to be met,” Zeldin said in a Fox News interview over this past weekend.
The administrator was referring to the agency’s shutdown plan, which would furlough more than 13,000 EPA employees once carryover funds run out.
EPA spokesperson Brigit Hirsch said in a statement the agency has been “intentional and aggressive” focusing on statutory obligations and presidential priorities during the shutdown. EPA’s statement didn’t address questions about how many employees have been furloughed and when carryover funds will expire.
Slowed operations
Parts of the agency’s operations have been stalled as spending starts to run thin. The publication of proposed and final rules in the Federal Register — a key step in allowing for public feedback and ensuring that new regulations take hold — has slowed to a trickle.
More than a month ago, for example, EPA dropped a bid to give the coke industry more time to meet hazardous air pollutant regulations strengthened last year during President Joe Biden’s tenure. But because the decision to reinstate the original compliance timetable has yet to appear in the Register, it has not taken effect.
EPA press aides acknowledged receipt of a Tuesday email but did not reply to questions regarding the publication delay.
The shutdown is also slowing proceedings in Clean Air Act lawsuits. Except for “very limited circumstances,” Department of Justice attorneys are prohibited from working, according to a filing early last month in legal challenges to another Biden administration regulation that tightened the annual soot exposure standard.
A federal appeals court agreed to DOJ’s request to postpone an upcoming deadline until funding is restored.
Water, chemical safety work
In EPA’s Office of Water, the shutdown has halted the distribution of grants to states, water utilities and local governments. The situation comes as EPA is months behind in allocating funding this year to states to remove and replace lead pipes under the state revolving funds.
EPA has also stopped approving new water quality standards and water pollution cleanup plans for specific bodies of water, per its shutdown plan. But the water office has continued to work on certain Trump administration priorities, having held a webinar on Oct. 14 about EPA’s plans to give coal companies more time to comply with a major water pollution rule.
It’s not clear how widespread the impacts have been when it comes to water-related permits, according to some observers.
“We have not heard of any issues yet. I think this is because of the carryover funding the agency was using,” Julia Anastasio, executive director of the Association of Clean Water Administrators, an association for state officials charged with protecting surface waters, said in an email.
“We know that several regional offices and parts of [the water office] were operating on carryover funds and that those funds are starting to run out,” Anastasio added.
Meanwhile, staffers who work on new chemical reviews and pesticide registrations have been churning out approvals, as evidenced by documents published in the Federal Register this week. But employees in that same office who work on pollution prevention programs — roughly 30 percent of the office’s workforce — have been furloughed.
The shutdown has added to the often lengthy wait times for EPA to process records requests under the Freedom of Information Act, with the agency citing “unusual circumstances” in noting that FOIA office employees may be furloughed.
Meanwhile, waste from industrial facilities has gone unchecked as meetings with polluters have been canceled, according to a third EPA employee who has been sent home. They recently stopped by one of the sites they had been monitoring.
“I watched the stack spew stuff into the air for a little bit before driving on,” said the staffer.
Energy Department
At the Energy Department, the shutdown has dealt the biggest blow to hundreds of staffers in the office that oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright late last month said the agency was finding “creative ways” to pay contractors at the National Nuclear Security Administration through the end of October. Wright’s comments arrived on the heels of the department furloughing 1,400 employees in the division. About 375 staffers are being exempted and will remain on the job at NNSA.
DOE later clarified that it had tapped money for contractors from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Trump signed in July.
Ben Dietderich, a spokesperson for DOE, said in a statement that NNSA contractors across the agency have enough funding to work through the end of November and that the agency is continuing to safeguard the nation’s nuclear deterrent.
“Due to the Democrat shutdown, a portion of the [NNSA] federal support contracts lapsed on October 31st. These contractors, which account for less than six percent of the NNSA’s contracts, primarily serve administrative roles,” said Dietderich. “Our contractors across NNSA’s labs, plants, and sites have funding through the end of the month. DOE/NNSA continues to safeguard our nation’s nuclear deterrent.”
Staffers throughout other parts of the agency say they’re girding for possible furloughs, but that hinges on how much funding their individual offices have left to continue operating.
They are also eyeing possible layoffs.
DOE last month notified staffers in at least six offices, including those focused on solar, wind and hydrogen, that they could be reassigned, fired or transferred.
The agency also accused those divisions of “wasteful spending” and “regulatory overreach” under the Biden administration, even though many of the offices don’t write regulations and are focused on research, and small-scale testing and demonstration of new technologies.
One DOE staffer said they’ve received no information “since those letters went out something like three weeks ago.”
Reporters Robin Bravender, Heather Richards, Kevin Bogardus, Hannah Northey, Scott Streater, Michael Doyle, Brian Dabbs, Ellie Borst, Sean Reilly and Miranda Willson contributed.
