“Folks in D.C. don’t understand is what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck,” Scranton, Pa., Mayor Paige Cognetti said.

A government shutdown with no end in sight is starting to take its toll on middle America, the mayors of four cities say.

In interviews, the mayors of Kansas City, Missouri; Scranton, Pennsylvania; Minneapolis; and Cleveland told NBC News they’re hearing from their residents about the fear, economic insecurity and sheer anger over the chaos wrought by a standstill in the nation’s capital.

“What folks in D.C. don’t understand is what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck,” said Paige Cognetti, the mayor of Scranton. “There are so many families here in Scranton that if their paycheck is in any way impacted by this federal shutdown, they are going to have to choose between rent and child care, child care and food.”

The mayors, all Democrats, as is the case in many major cities, say their residents are asking questions about health care and whether their Social Security checks will still arrive. Some want to know about housing vouchers or SNAP food benefits.

The tensions are rising as the federal government shutdown entered its 17th day Friday. The logjam has already meant scores of federal employees aren’t working, while some remain working but without paychecks.

Each party is casting blame on the other for the standstill. Democrats point at Republicans, who hold power in the White House and both chambers of Congress, accusing them of refusing to come to the table to talk about protecting people from losing their health care coverage and facing soaring premiums. Republicans cast Democrats as making unreasonable demands.

Mayors say that for them, shutting down isn’t an option. Regardless of political infighting in Congress, mayors must keep the water running and the garbage picked up. In some cases, they feared cutbacks could do damage to vulnerable populations, like homeless veterans, and they would have to step in to fill the gap. And now they are doing so under the constant threat of diminishing federal funding streams.

“I’m seeing a lot of anger, and the anger I’m seeing is from the fact that Republicans and the president ran on lowering the cost of living for Americans in the last election,” Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb said. “What they’ve done is — not only have they continued to raise prices and increase the cost of health insurance on everyday Americans; now they’re trying to blame the Democrats for the shutdown.”

The White House pushed back against the characterizations.

“These mayors should know the facts: it was their fellow Democrats in the U.S. Senate who shut down the federal government,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. “If Senate Democrats really care about everyday American citizens and American cities that rely on federal funding, they should reopen the federal government with the same clean funding bill they’ve previously voted 13 times for under Joe Biden.”

The mayors, however, say there are many layers to their uncertainty — including a constant threat that President Donald Trump will target their cities for politically motivated reasons.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey cast the Trump administration as having been scattershot and inconsistent in its approach to his city all year. Frey spoke about federal grant programs that were in question at one point.

“The consequences of really poor choices are felt at the local level, and we’re the ones that pick up the slack,” he said. “People come to us looking for solutions, and it always helps when you have a solution-oriented partner in the White House.”

Now, the shutdown is injecting a whole new element of havoc, he said.

“Our ability to anticipate what’s coming down the pike is way less clear when you have a federal administration that is operating in chaos, and two is trying to withhold federal funds, and three is presently in a shutdown,” Frey said.

Cognetti said the shutdown is just the latest blow to families and small businesses after a year of cuts from Washington.

“We’re already in a situation where many of our nonprofit organizations, our school district, our health and human services through the county are struggling to figure out how they’re going to make it through the end of the year and in the coming years,” she said. “With budget cuts and this stall of federal funds [it] is going to make this much worse.”

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said 30,000 federal employees are on edge.

“I’m hearing anger from workers, I think workers, even dating back to the beginning of the year, who say, ‘Look, I don’t really give a damn who the president is, I’m gonna show up and do my job and fulfill the mission.’ And the fact that that’s been undermined every step of the way, I think, is frustrating,” he said.