From the Texas Tribune: Federal Government Shutdown to Keep Texas Workers Home

How will the federal shutdown affect the state? Many federal workers live in Texas. That's lots of lost revenue.

Thousands of “nonessential” Texas federal employees will be off the job until Congress passes legislation to turn the government’s lights back on.

Texas has the nation's third-highest concentration of federal employees, according to the University of Texas at Austin's Texas Politics Project, and many of those 140,000 workers will go without a paycheck.

. . . NASA, headquartered in Houston, is slated to close, with 97 percent of its employees at home. The Department of Homeland Security will temporarily halt its E-Verify program, preventing business owners from checking the immigration status of prospective employees. Border Patrol agents will remain on the job, but their paychecks will most likely be delayed. The Department of Energy will run on a third of its staff, with employees working on nuclear materials and power grids still on the clock.

Military personnel would have been paid by IOUs following a shutdown, but a last-minute bill signed by the president two hours before the deadline Monday night extended military salaries into fiscal year 2014.

While federal employees will feel the initial pinch, state agencies reliant on federal funding are scrambling to cover budget holes to carry them through the shutdown. The stalemate will be “catastrophic” if it lasts longer than a few weeks, said Tory Gunsolley, president of the Houston Housing Authority, which distributes housing vouchers to low-income families. October payments for the Housing Choice Voucher Program are already promised by Washington, but November’s are not.

“There simply isn’t enough money to be able to make good on our obligations without the federal government because there is not another source of money,” Gunsolley said. The Houston Housing Authority provides rental assistance for 60,000 people, costing about $10 million per month.