Trump demanded $5.7 billion for a wall. Paying back furloughed workers is about to cost $6 billion.

Federal workers.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

About 800,000 government workers have gone five weeks without a paycheck. Each one of them has missed an average of $5,600 in wages. And altogether, that's more than the $5.7 billion President Trump ever wanted for his border wall, a new study from Sentier Research has found.

Furloughed government employees, some of whom are still required to work, are about to miss their second paycheck since the government partially lost funding in December, The Washington Post points out. They're owed $4.7 billion so far, and that number will jump to $6 billion on Friday. But it's not as if that massive check has completely disappeared from the government's radar, seeing as Congress and Trump passed a bill guaranteeing all these workers — save for contractors — will be paid once the shutdown ends. That effectively means the government will have to pay more money than originally caused the shutdown, and some of it will go toward work that wasn't even completed.

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Kathryn Krawczyk

Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.