Deadlocked, President Trump and Congress remain at an impasse over money for a border wall.
But hungry bacteria in a valuable U.S. Geological Survey experiment remain very much alive.
So a furloughed scientist, against orders, sneaks into the closed Menlo Park-based lab to feed the microbes — ensuring that the three-year-long project, while hobbled, doesn’t fail.
He is just one of the Bay Area’s many frustrated researchers caught in the middle of the power struggle that shows no sign of being resolved any time soon.
So far, President Trump has refused to consider a budget that lacks $5.6 billion to support a border wall. On Monday he told reporters as he boarded Marine One that he has rejected a proposal by Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to temporarily reopen the government in an effort to jump-start talks with Democratic lawmakers on funding the wall.
At NASA Ames Research Center, scientists are supposed to be busy getting ready to test software that will fly on the International Space Station this year. They should be designing air traffic control systems for unmanned aircraft and drones. They’ve already skipped January’s big annual American Astronomical Society conference and missed the deadline to submit their work to the upcoming Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, the largest planetary science meeting in the world.
“I can’t even read my email,” said Ames scientist Jeremy Frank of Sunnyvale, a PhD in computer science who builds software that helps astronauts operate future missions to Mars without assistance from Mission Control. To fend off boredom, he’s doing chores, reading and bird watching at Los Gatos Creek County Park.
With a doctorate in Industrial Engineering, aeronautics expert Parimal Kopardekar, who is not allowed to disclose where he works, is spending his time leading hikes in the Cupertino Hills and cooking dinner for his family.
Larry Miller, who studies the fate of chromium in contaminated groundwater, cleaned the family’s chicken coop, helped friends by house-sitting and built a dog run for a new puppy. He’s preparing for his future retirement, exploring ways to teach, write research findings and review journal articles. He’s also surfing, leaving his El Granada home before dawn.
“The furlough coincides with a nice run of winter surf,” he said.
A NASA scientist who asked not to be identified said, “Our whole program for returning to the moon — ostensibly a Trump administration priority — is slipping on a day-by-day basis. The Chinese are moving forward with great speed, and their achievements are impressing the entire world … while we’re unable to do a thing.”
Congress has already passed a bill that will provide back pay to federal workers once they are back on the job when the shutdown ends.
And Bay Area labs, which were separately funded through September — Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore Lab, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Sandia National Labs in Livermore — are safe from this shutdown.
But USGS and NASA Ames are closed. So are the Agriculture Department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is on partial shutdown. And the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is continuing to pay 794 essential employees, some responsible for maintaining scientific instrumentation and lab animals, plants and test organisms.
The National Park Service suspended wildlife monitoring of species such as the endangered Coho salmon at Point Reyes National Seashore and the Golden Gate National Recreation, because 80 percent of the park employees are furloughed. Other critical research “windows,” such as seasonal shifts in insect populations, are missed.
Visitors to Point Reyes, Merced National Wildlife Refuge and other federal parks say they are quiet and beautiful but without facilities.
“We saw a bobcat right near the closed Visitors Center and watched for a good 15 minutes,” said Deborah Petersen of Half Moon Bay, who visited Point Reyes on Sunday. “I hate to see this shutdown and feel badly for all the hardworking government workers going without paychecks. But for those of us who took the chance to visit the national seashore, we were rewarded with a more peaceful and wilder experience than usual.”
Because furloughed government scientists are banned from any form of work activity, Kopardekar has created a Facebook group called Shutdown Strategies – Support Group, where members share coping strategies.
“What I miss is the interaction with colleagues,” he said. “I don’t like to sit alone. I like teamwork. If I feel unattached from everybody, I realized others might feel the same way.”
Some suggestions are homespun: Bake pies! Empty the freezer! Clean up clutter!
Other suggestions, like Kopardekar’s score card, are analytical. His four-cell table lets furloughed workers track their daily score on four dimensions: self-development, exercise, diet and connections.
“Try to get 4.0 daily!” he wrote.
Scientists say they are still engaged in professional activities. Kopardekar reviews the online curriculum and course content at Colorado State University’s business school. He also is volunteering his time and strategic advice to friends’ start-up companies.
USGS’s Larry Miller continues to fulfill one important and deadline-driven part of his job: reviewing manuscripts of journal articles.
“I agreed to do it, so I felt obligated,” he said. “Also, I’m the best person to do the review.”
Despite pledges from Congress that they will receive back pay, many furloughed workers have financial anxieties. While their working spouses help shoulder the burden, they say the cost of living in the Bay Area is unsustainable on one salary.
“We had a family discussion and decided that we won’t go out to eat — at all — during the furlough,” said one NASA scientist who asked not to be named because the agency asked employees not to give interviews about the shutdown. “We’re also postponing or canceling planned purchases, and all of our vacation planning for this year is either on hold or we’ll cancel it entirely.”
To survive, they may seek jobs in the private sector.
“For many of us — highly skilled technical workers at NASA and other agencies — we could easily get jobs in the private sector paying far more than we make now,” the scientist said. “We stay where we are, despite our lower salaries, because of our dedication to our country and because of our passion for what we do — tasks that no one else in the world does. Quite simply, we love our work.
“But the current shutdown, perhaps more than any other in the past, has thrown all of this into question,” he said. “We can accept lower salaries, but we can’t accept no salary at all.”
The New York Times and the Marin Independent Journal contributed to this article.