Tens of thousands of Colorado workers were in limbo Wednesday as the latest partial shutdown of the federal government played out in Washington, D.C., resulting in furloughs across the country.
About 54,300 federal employees work in Colorado, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. That doesn’t include nearly 38,000 active-duty military service members who are based in the state, according to the Defense Manpower Data Center, and must continue serving without pay.
It wasn’t immediately clear Wednesday how the tens of thousands of civilian workers were spread across the different federal agencies with presences in Colorado, including at the Federal Center in Lakewood, government labs and other sites. Not all workers are furloughed, with significant exemptions in some agencies. Excepted employees, or those whose work includes protecting life and property, are expected to continue working, though they won’t be paid until the shutdown ends.
But some impacts were evident. The vast majority of staff and researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder were out of work due to the shutdown, according to U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse’s office, with some — from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the National Weather Service — working without pay.
Though the exact number of furloughed workers wasn’t available, most of the research at NOAA labs had stopped.
Other agencies, such as the U.S. Postal Service, have separate funding mechanisms that keep their work — and public services — continuing apace.
The Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, continues to provide veteran medical care and other critical services, according to its public contingency plan for the shutdown. That includes suicide prevention programs, homelessness programs, the veterans crisis line, and caregiver support, according to its website.
The state’s labor department said that many furloughed federal workers may be eligible for unemployment benefits, though they would have to pay back any money received once the shutdown ends and the government pays them retroactively.
Immigration agencies, EPA continue work
Colorado’s two immigration courts were still processing cases Wednesday, despite the shutdown. Judges overseeing proceedings in the Aurora detention center were still balancing full dockets, and a receptionist for the Denver court, which oversees immigration cases where people aren’t in custody, said work was continuing there, too.
Non-detained immigration cases may eventually be delayed, according to an FAQ page posted by U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet’s office. The “vast majority” of employees at federal agencies in charge of border protection, immigration services and enforcement should be unaffected by the shutdown, the page added, citing Department of Homeland Security estimates.
Some agencies were set to continue work until their previously appropriated budgets ran out.
Miles Batson, executive vice president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents nearly 8,000 Environmental Protection Agency employees, said he and others were working and getting paid via carryover funds for now.
EPA employees received anonymous emails that told them to report to work as usual on Wednesday and said they would be furloughed when that money ran out, said Batson, who spoke with The Denver Post on personal time. The problem, said Batson, who works in a Denver laboratory, is that they did not know when that would be.
“I couldn’t tell you whether it might end tomorrow or it might end next week,” he said. “It’s not ruining people’s lives, but it’s making people’s lives very stressful. All of that’s being purposely left in the dark these days so people are confused and stressed.”
State steps in to continue food program
Other services to the public, however, may be curtailed or halted during the shutdown.
On Tuesday, the state legislature’s Joint Budget Committee approved spending $7.5 million to pay for Women, Infants and Children food benefits, or WIC, for a month in the event of a federal shutdown. The federal government typically pays for the program. Gov. Jared Polis warned that the program was set to halt payments immediately without the state money.
“WIC is one of a myriad challenges the state faces the longer this goes on,” Polis said in a statement, which included a reference to Democrats’ strategy of seeking to pair health care-related funding with a shutdown resolution. “The state cannot fill the void left by the federal government, and if they do not reopen the government and save health care for Coloradans, the consequences will be dire.”
Federal lands are open to public
Rocky Mountain National Park, a gem of the state and perhaps the most visible federal function in Colorado, remained open.
Nationwide guidance to the National Park Service indicated the nation’s beloved parks should remain as accessible as possible, despite concerns from conservationists that unsupervised access could result in damage to fragile ecosystems and park infrastructure, as happened at many sites during a 2018-2019 shutdown that lasted 35 days.
Rocky Mountain National Park remains open despite government shutdown
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The millions of acres of public lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management will also remain open.
Thousands of employees from the three land management agencies will be furloughed, except those who work as law enforcement or emergency responders and in other roles necessary for the safety of human life or the protection of property, including firefighting. The NPS expected to furlough about two-thirds of employees nationally.
Forest Service employees working to implement the Trump administration’s expansion of logging, as well as BLM workers tasked with expanding oil and gas production under the administration’s guidance, can also be exempted from furloughs, according to the agencies’ shutdown contingency plans.
Varying impact at Boulder labs
In Boulder, which is home to about 17 federally funded labs, there was varying impact. The labs employ nearly 3,600 people throughout Boulder County, according to 2024 research done by the Boulder Chamber’s Economic Council.
The U.S. Department of Commerce released a list of services affected by the shutdown, noting that most research activities at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as NOAA, would stop. Weather forecasting, weather warnings and climate predictions will continue, according to the department, in addition to other services related to national security and public safety.
Officials at NOAA and NIST did not immediately respond to questions on Wednesday. Dan Powers, the executive director of CO-LABS, a nonprofit group that champions the value of taxpayer-funded research, estimated that hundreds of employees at the Department of Commerce campus in Boulder had been furloughed.
Powers said uncertainty was high as employees he’d spoken to were worried that their temporary furlough would turn into being permanently fired, as the Trump administration had threatened more broadly ahead of the shutdown.
“They’ve just received instructions while they’re furloughed to keep an eye on their email for any notice that they have been RIF-ed, or fired,” Powers said, referring to the phrase “reduction in force.”
The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder was operating as usual, with staff continuing to receive paychecks, according to spokesman David Hosansky.
“Even though most of our funding comes from the federal government, we’re not federal employees,” Hosansky wrote in an email to the Daily Camera. ”… While new grants won’t be awarded for the duration of the shutdown, and it’s possible we could receive stop-work orders for some projects funded outside of our (National Science Foundation) base funds, we don’t anticipate substantial interruptions to our operations or research.”
How Colorado’s senators voted
The latest shutdown stems from a fight in which most Democrats have refused to sign onto Republicans’ short-term continuing resolution as they take a stand over health care funding. Democrats are demanding that Congress reverse cuts made to Medicaid under President Donald Trump’s signature tax and funding bill passed over the summer, as well as extend soon-to-expire tax credits for people who buy health insurance on Affordable Care Act marketplaces.
Connect for Health Colorado, the state’s marketplace, estimates 112,000 Coloradans would lose health care coverage if the federal subsidy isn’t renewed.
Federal Republicans have called Democrats’ proposals a nonstarter because of their more than $1 trillion price tag, leading to the impasse on federal spending as Republicans have sought to pass a short-term measure to fund the government through Nov. 21. Democrats, who are the minority in both chambers of Congress and out of power in the White House, largely united against it and blocked passage in the Senate, where there’s a 60-vote threshold.
Colorado’s delegation has voted on the funding measures along party lines, including nays lodged again Wednesday by Bennet and Sen. John Hickenlooper, both Democrats.
In a call with the media Wednesday afternoon, Bennet said the cuts to Medicaid and the loss of the subsidies “is going to create a huge amount of misery in Colorado, and all across the country, and I think this is a fight worth having.” He didn’t have a specific prediction on how long the shutdown would last.
But he said ongoing conversations gave him hope for a bipartisan solution.
“If we let this budget go by without fixing this problem, it would never be fixed for the American people,” Bennet said.
Republicans have criticized Democrats for trying to negotiate rather than passing a clean funding measure. U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans said in a statement Wednesday that Democrats “abandoned the American people, played political games and forced a shutdown.”
Trump has meanwhile promised to wield the shutdown like a cudgel.
“We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible by them,” Trump said of Democrats. “Like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.”
Staff writers Noelle Phillips, Seth Klamann and Aldo Svaldi contributed to this story, as did the Associated Press.
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