WASHINGTON — When Jill Hornick woke up on a recent Monday morning, her first thought was that her timecard would be submitted that day for her job with the Social Security Administration in Chicago. But this Monday was different. The federal government was locked in a shutdown, and she received a paycheck for $0.

“This is the only income I have,” she said. “And I just started crying. I had a meltdown.”

Hornick, 59, is one of 730,000 federal employees working without pay because of the impasse. Another 670,000 federal workers are furloughed without pay, according to data from the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

As the shutdown stretches toward its fifth week, those government employees are confronting an increasingly acute and stressful scenario. Their bills are mounti

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