The shutdown is hitting government workers in New York so hard — they’ve been reduced to eating like college kids.
Furloughed Williamsburg-based federal worker Keith Polite, 55, has been tightening his purse strings by chowing down on Ramen noodles since the shutdown began, he said at a rally Sunday.
“I’m staying home, eating Ramen noodles, you know, that college food,” the National Museum of the American Indian security guard said at an anti-shutdown rally in downtown Manhattan.
“I’m learning how to cook because I eat out all the time, a typical New Yorker,” added Polite. “Hopefully I don’t get myself sick by cooking.”
Polite’s sister, a TSA Agent, has also been affected by the shutdown and may need to start borrowing cash from other relatives, like him, he said.
“She is distraught,” Polite said.
Another worker, Antony Tseng, an Environmental Protection Agency engineer who lives in Beacon, said he’s having to sift through his bills, realizing there are many he won’t be able to pay at the moment.
“When you live check to check, your budget is already slim,” said Tseng, 46. “I have bills that I have to figure out which ones I have to pay late.”
Tseng’s 22-year-old daughter Samantha told reporters at the rally she was thinking of picking up a second job to help her dad out. That’s in addition to being a full-time SUNY student and working as an administrative assistant at a civil engineering firm.
About two dozen people attended the rally at Gouverneur Health in the Lower East Side.
“We’re here today because one person in Washington has decided to throw a political temper tantrum… President Trump made the unilateral decision to shut down the federal government,” Democratic Rep. Nydia Velázquez told the crowd.
The shutdown became the longest on record over the weekend.