About 800,000 federal workers are furloughed or working without pay across the country because of the government shutdown, many of them concentrated in the West.

Some States Feel the Shutdown More Than Others

Number of federal workers at agencies affected
by the shutdown per 10,000 workers

Over all, federal workers account for about 1.5 percent of the country’s labor force, with a fifth of them in the Washington metro area. But the shutdown has hit some agencies — and states — harder than others.

Outside the capital, states with large numbers of workers for the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior are more likely to feel the shutdown’s effects. And nearly the entire staff of the Environmental Protection Agency is furloughed, including hundreds of workers in North Carolina and Illinois.

A budget agreement to end the shutdown remains the subject of a fierce partisan fight in Congress, with federal workers caught in the middle. Some senators who count these workers among their constituents are pushing for an end to the impasse, but federal employment does not appear to have a clear relationship to lawmakers’ positions on the shutdown.

Senate Democrats in Virginia and Maryland, two states where federal employment is high, have urged their colleagues to vote on a House-passed bill to end the shutdown. Senator Jon Tester of Montana, the state with the second-highest concentration of affected federal workers, has similarly called for a resolution.

And as the shutdown lingered in its third week, some Senate Republicans seemed ready for an end to the stalemate. Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Cory Gardner of Colorado, and Susan Collins of Maine all said they support reopening the government. Alaska has the highest number of affected federal workers per capita, and Colorado has 16,000 people working in agencies affected by the shutdown. Maine, however, has relatively few.