For Henry Jones, the threat of a government shutdown wasn’t real—until it was.

Jones, a senior political communications major at Emerson, works as an intern for Mass. Rep. Ayanna Pressley in her Washington congressional office. He said his superiors readily reassured staff to keep their heads down amid shutdown rumors. All the while, arguments on the passage of a government funding bill heated up just a few doors down. 

“The sort of line was ‘things happen so quickly in the Capitol that a week or two from now feels like an eternity,’” he said.

But for him and the many other interns working in federal positions, no feeling could be truer in the weeks that followed Oct. 1, when the nationwide government shutdown was announced. The shutdown, now in its 15th day, caused the furlough, or suspension of work, for almost a million federal workers nationwide and on Capitol Hill. 

The fight occurred as both parties sparred over extensions for Affordable Care Act subsidies in the recent bill. Since then, both sides refused to back down in successive stopgap funding measures, even as the country felt the pain of a prolonged closure caused by the lack of authorized funding for this fiscal year.

For Jones, that pain means missing out on valuable time at a position he worked hard for.

“I personally feel deflated … this is really my dream internship,” Jones said. “Not being able to make what I want out of [it] definitely feels like a missed opportunity.”

Jones joined 16 other Emerson students and around 300 total students at The Washington Center (TWC), a non-profit professional development organization based in D.C. that helps coordinate internships for academic accreditation. Since Oct. 1, roughly 30 to 40 students in this year’s TWC cohort, the majority of whom are congressional interns, have been placed on furloughs from federal positions, Jones said. Three of those who have been placed on furlough are Emerson students, interns in the program confirmed with The Beacon. 

Those who are furloughed remain cut off from any contact with their congressional offices. Many feel left to watch the clock tick on what continues to be a politically stagnant issue.

“We really did just get here a month or so ago … then all of a sudden it’s just like taken away, and I feel like I should be there,” Anna Chalupa, a senior political communications major at Emerson interning for the Democratic Women’s Caucus, said.

She said her last days in the office reminded her of the final days before lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a feeling of not knowing where to go next. Chalupa, along with other interns, was instructed to leave her computer, identification badge, and work phone in the office as she left for the last time.

“It got chaotic very fast, but once we left and went home that day, it’s been so quiet, just eerily quiet,” Chalupa said. “I definitely do feel frustrated … this opportunity does kind of feel like it’s being taken away,” she said.

Before this month, the most recent government shutdown lasted a historic 35 days between December 2018 and January 2019, during President Trump’s first term in office. Last weekend, the Trump administration announced the beginning of federal layoffs associated with the current shutdown. An estimated 4,200 employees across federal agencies were notified of their layoffs on Friday, though roughly 700 of those reductions have since been reversed. 

Jones’ internship is a paid position, meaning that under a law enacted during the last shutdown, he can expect to receive back pay when the shutdown ends, though some doubt has been cast over compensation guarantees following this shutdown.

Conversely, Chalupa’s internship is unpaid, meaning she is not among the federal employees waiting until the end of the shutdown for their next paycheck.

“We would do this work for free … we’re all very disappointed that there isn’t an avenue for us to continue our work,” Jones said.

Without a daily work schedule, Vincent Raynauld, Emerson’s liaison to The Washington Center, and a professor of political communications at the college, said students in the TWC cohort are receiving alternative programming to help fulfill their accreditation requirements.

“It’s not like we’re leaving students on their own,” Raynauld told The Beacon during the first week of the shutdown.

He took up his role in 2020, making this recent shutdown the first he has presided over, though he emphasized that the D.C program has a strong history of resilience to anchor it, and was the only Emerson study program that did not shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

However, according to Jones and others on furlough, the supplementary programming has drawn another unfavorable comparison to the educational environment of the COVID-19 pandemic: shoddy, hastily put-together activities.

As part of mandated five-day-a-week alternative activities, furloughed interns went on tours of various Washington museums and local college campuses and were asked to complete reflection responses about their experience, Jones said. He explained that while he understands the bind program directors are put in, these activities aren’t helping fulfill the experiences he and others came to Washington for. 

“We’re definitely pissed off that this sloppy programming has been put in place that feels like busy work,” he said, adding that the activities are run by TWC staff, not professors.

Chalupa said she appreciates the program director’s best efforts to put together programming under a tight timetable.

“I came here for a specific job and I’m not able to do that,” she added. “It feels like a substitute teacher.”

For both interns, experiencing the shutdown from the front lines has also been a teaching moment of its own.

“We talk a lot about polarization, and how the two sides can’t get along, but I feel like it’s different to see that in person,” Chalupa said. “We should be working together, but we’re actually doing the opposite.”

Despite the impact on him, Jones said he supports Democrats standing up to the Republican establishment on health care issues for as long as necessary.

“If that’s the hill they’re willing to die on, I say keep the government closed as long as you need to,” he said.

If the shutdown does last into November, as many predict, it would challenge the record for the longest closure in the country’s history, meaning over a third of the cohort’s internship time would be deferred by the furlough. As Chalupa prepares to graduate next spring, she worries she won’t get the networking benefits of her internship if work doesn’t resume.

“We gave up our Emerson courses to come here to get that real-life experience, but now it feels like we’re not getting either,” Chalupa said.

During a workshop on Wednesday, Sean Zimny, Director of Programs at The Washington Center, informed students that they would need to find alternative internships to retain their academic accreditation. Students were told the decision was influenced by pressure from various colleges across the TWC system, though the overall communication was “vague,” Jones said.

When Jones asked if he could contact Emerson specifically about his case, Zimny told him it would have to be worked out with the college itself, but TWC had its own policies mandating a return to work.

Jones has now been paired up with a new academic advisor, shifting focus away from remedial programming towards onboarding for new positions, which the TWC hopes to accomplish in the next week or two.

“We are really kind of in the dark on what that’s going to look like,” Jones said. A TWC policy mandates students to drop one internship if they accept another, which would mean not being able to return to Capitol Hill if the shutdown ends, Jones said.

 “[That’s] what really has all of us so knotted up,” he said. While Jones believes program directors are trying to do the right thing, the manner in which the return-to-work policies are handled is placing “harmful and destructive” limits on the process, he said.

In general, Jones said he remains confused about why the back-to-work mandate is necessary. He said another furloughed intern from a different school called her college after the Wednesday meeting and worked out a plan to remain furloughed while performing a directed study to satisfy credit in the meantime.

For Jones, he feels this indicates that what happens next for the interns is up to the colleges more than TWC.

“It seems that Emerson is not one of those campuses that’s willing to work with us, that they will just say ‘tough luck,’” he said.

Raynauld said the decision to move forward was made by TWC, though he was aware of a general timeline for how internship status during a shutdown could proceed, with a necessary pivot to new internships if it didn’t resolve quickly. 

“If we were to turn this into a directed study type project or any other type of project, we’re losing this hands-on experience,” he said.

Jones said finding a new internship worries him, and in quitting his congressional post, he would harm the networking value the program was meant to offer. He said he thinks TWC is concerned with its reputation as well.

“They don’t want us to join a new internship and then burn the bridge with the TWC by leaving abruptly,” Jones said. “I think the nuance there is really that the TWC cares a lot more about maintaining that network and their reputation within DC than empowering their students.”

Raynauld clarified that students will be expected to remain with their new internships because, based on TWC’s estimates, the shutdown is likely to extend until a few weeks before the semester’s end. Even if the government reopened sooner, most federal offices would take weeks to return to normal functioning, which would further hinder internship experience, he said.

The Washington Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its procedures in handling internship transitions. Raynauld will travel to D.C. tomorrow to meet with students.

“We’re trying to make sure that students get as much as they can out of the program,” he said.