Maybe the silver lining is that an FBI employee gets paid roughly the same as every other federal agency employee, barring some weird locality and specialization pays.
It’s not as powerful to say a national parks employee or a bureau of X worker is struggling to make ends meet because they’re typically not exciting or sexy conversation points. I wholeheartedly believe that this is affecting way more than just the FBI workforce.
What we’re seeing is that costs have risen above and beyond what every single typical government employee is making and that lawmakers have not made any deliberate efforts to increase federal pay outside of the yearly sub-inflation pay increases. Add to that the inability to pass budgets on time and you have a few million people who aren’t getting paid enough to match their lifestyle for the previous year, every year, with added stressors of somehow saving money to account for not being paid for indeterminate amounts of time thanks to government shutdowns which are solved literal hours before coming into effect. Federal service isn’t a glamorous or high paying career field, but it’s supposed to be a stable one which provides enough to live with. Now, we’re seeing that slowly erode.