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Last winter’s government shutdown was worse than you thought. New study says about 1 of 3 federal workers in Utah went to a food pantry or missed house payments.

Washington • The IRS worker in the Ogden area was already the sole breadwinner for a family of five and short on cash around Christmastime.

“It literally happened at the worst possible time of [the] year,” the worker wrote in a new report that highlights challenges federal employees in Utah faced – and some still face – because of the Washington impasse that furloughed hundreds of thousands of federal workers across the country for more than a month.

The worker, who isn’t identified in the new report by Weber State University, said work had piled up so much during the shutdown, the person had to work five times as hard to dig out from under.