10 Nov 13th-Nov 19th, 2025 phoenixnewtimes.com PHOENIX NEW TIMES | NEWS | FEATURE | FOOD & DRINK | ARTS & CULTURE | MUSIC | CONCERTS | CANNABIS | Shutdown Woes I’m a furloughed federal worker in Arizona. I DoorDash to survive. BY JESSICA HOLWELL N early every night, my husband and I load our four kids into our gray Volkswagen Tiguan. With my husband in the driver’s seat, I open the DoorDash app and we hit the road. We’ll drive for the next several hours, flitting from chain restaurants to homes, hoping to make enough money to feed the children in the backseat. We do this because I’ve been furloughed. Until Oct. 1, I worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs. I moni- tored and oversaw crisis calls from veterans who contacted the department’s hotline, ensuring they received the infor- mation, services and resources if needed. In late September, I accepted a detail to a new role, but before I could start, the federal government shut down. In the new detail, I was no longer considered an “essential worker,” and so I was shut down, too. I haven’t been paid in more than a month, and with the shutdown now the longest in American history, I don’t know when I’ll get to go back. My husband, Myron, works as a brick- layer during the day and pulls double duty with me at night. I’m not comfortable driving or going into crowded public restau- rants, so he takes the wheel as we make our way around Surprise, where we live. Sometimes we venture as far as Glendale, picking up orders from popular restaurants — McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Cracker Barrel — and dropping them on doorsteps. We’ll work for two to three hours each night, hoping to earn $200 a week to cover our grocery bill. We’ve made it into a family-bonding game of sorts. The kids — I have five, but the oldest is grown and out of the house — guess which restaurant we’ll be heading to next. Then they take turns hopping in and out of the car with Myron to fetch orders from the restaurant. I’ll send a GIF to the customer to let them know we’re on the way, and then I’ll drop off the food and give a friendly wave to any doorbell cameras. We repeat this process four or five times a night. My mother suggested I do this shortly before the shutdown began. She’s also a casualty of government cuts, opting for early retirement from the VA earlier this summer due to a reduction-in-force. Like me, she’s turned to DoorDash. So far, it’s been a lifesaver for us. I sought a job as a federal worker partly because of the excellent health insurance benefits for my children. I absolutely love the work that I do, the people I help and my colleagues. But when I began working as a federal employee five years ago — first as a corrections officer in Texas — I never imagined a situation like this. I never thought my family would struggle to make ends meet because of political grid- lock in Washington, D.C. Jessica Holwell is furloughed from her job at the Department of Veterans Affairs during the government shutdown. (Morgan Fischer) >> p 13 | NEWS | | NEWS |
