When she heard the news that a deadlock in Congress had caused a federal government shutdown, Ashley Totten said it felt like déjà vu all over again.
“Here we are again, right?” she said Wednesday morning.
She and her husband, Terence Totten, a machinery technician for the U.S. Coast Guard, went without his paycheck for 35 days during the last government shutdown in 2018-19. That was a serious hardship because the younger of their two sons, then just three months old, needed surgery for a congenital heart defect…