Federal workers face payless paydays as government shutdown drags on.

Denise Benjamin is supposed to get paid on Friday — but the money won’t be in her bank account.

Benjamin, who lives in Tamarac, works for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Miami, and is among an estimated 13,000 federal workers in Florida who won’t get paid because of the partial federal government shutdown.

In Benjamin’s case, that means about $2,900 in take-home pay she gets every two weeks won’t be there at week’s end. She’s already juggling bills and searching for ways to bring in a little money.

Benjamin’s savings are depleted by repair work she recently completed on her home. “I’m basically living paycheck to paycheck,” she said Tuesday.

Her daughter, who lives in Washington, D.C., can’t help — she’s also a federal government employee with the Food and Drug Administration, and also is furloughed without pay.

To conserve cash, Benjamin said she contacted her mortgage lender and didn’t make her January payment so she can pay her other bills. And she just signed up to rent a room in her home via Airbnb; her first booking is on Jan. 25.

Benjamin, along with her HUD coworker Peggy Johannsen, shared their stories in a news conference and interviews with reporters Tuesday as part of an effort by Democratic U.S. Reps. Ted Deutch and Debbie Wasserman Schultz to demonstrate some of the impact of the shutdown of parts of the federal government.

The workers, and people who use various government services, are collateral damage from President Donald Trump’s decision to block funding of several government agencies as part of his effort to persuade Congress to authorize spending $5.6 billion toward construction of a wall on the southern U.S. border.

Johannsen said her pay, about $2,000, won’t be in her bank account on its usual day, Saturday. “I have no plan. I’m just hoping for the best,” she said. “The bills keep coming in.”

Money is tight at Johannsen’s Sunrise home. Johannsen’s wife is retired on disability, and she has other unexpected expenses: travel to Kansas City for her niece’s funeral last month and upcoming travel to Nebraska for the funeral of her father who recently died.

She said she thinks they’ll have enough money for the February mortgage payment. But if the shutdown drags on too long, Johannsen is contemplating a move financial planners warn is a long-term mistake: borrowing from her retirement savings. “I have never had to do that,” she said.

Benjamin and Johannsen said they think they’ll be OK in the long-run. Generally federal employees get back pay for time they’re furloughed. But contract workers, like the people who clean the office building where they work, don’t get back pay.

In the meantime, they’re blaming Trump for the difficulties they and others are facing. In December, the president was willing to accept federal spending legislation without wall money — until he faced harsh criticism from conservative commentators that he needed to hold out to pressure Congress to appropriate money toward construction of a wall on the southern U..S. border.

“This is not our fight and we are sick of being used as pawns,” Johannsen said. “This isn’t the way that you govern. This isn’t the way that you legislate. You don’t hold people hostage.”

Benjamin said she was “disappointed that we have somebody so unstable running the government.”

Wasserman Schultz and Deutch were even more critical of the president.

Wasserman Schultz, who represents parts of Broward and Miami-Dade counties, termed the shutdown a “shady political stunt designed to stir up his nativist base” and said the president has a “needless border wall fetish.”

Federal workers aren’t the only ones hurt by the presidential “temper tantrum,” she said. Programs such as Federal Housing Administration loans can’t be processed and small business assistance is on hold.

Deutch, who represents parts of Broward and Palm Beach counties, warned more severe suffering ensue if the impasse continues. At the end of the month, he said, there wouldn’t be enough money for people who depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to buy food. SNAP is commonly known as food stamps.

Appearing with the public employees in Plantation in advance of Trump’s planned Tuesday night address to the nation, Wasserman Schultz said “the president’s position is unraveling and we all need to be watchful for the lies that he will spew.”

Deutch and Wasserman Schultz said they favor border security, but not a border wall, which they said isn’t needed.

They warned against the notion that Trump would declare a national emergency as a way to use money allocated for the Defense Department money to build the wall. Wasserman Schlutz, chairwoman of the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee, said such move “will truly put or troops and national security at risk.”

Deutch faulted the Trump administration for inaccurately asserting that 3,000 to 4,000 potential terrorists attempted to cross the southern border into the U.S. “There are not 4,000 terrorists streaming accross the border. That was factually incorrect. That was a lie.”