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During the 2018 midterm elections, the advocacy group 314 Action made it its mission to get people with STEM backgrounds to run for Congress. Now, nine of the 13 candidates they endorsed have taken the oath of office, including Kim Schrier, who officially became the only woman doctor in Congress on Thursday.

VICE News' Arielle Duhaime-Ross went to Washington and spoke with a few of Congress’ newest nerds.

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FRESNO, Calif. — Aaron McGlothin, 43, works as a corrections officer at the federal prison in Mendota, California. He’s had a decades-long, stable career in corrections. But with no paycheck in sight due to the government shutdown, he’s started driving for Uber to help make ends meet.

“It can be a little embarrassing,” he told VICE News while driving around Fresno in the rain on Saturday, looking for rides. “The embarrassing thing is, it's like, well — you have a job, you know? And then when people see this they're going to realize that, well heck yeah you got a job, but you're not getting paid.”

It’s a slow day, and after two hours Ubering McGlothin makes less than $10 — but at this point, anything’s worth it.

“I live paycheck to paycheck,” he said. “I've got to have food on my table. I've got to have gas in my tank to get to and from work because I'm not getting paid. I've got to have heat, gotta have my lights on. I've got to have my electricity on.”

McGlothin is one of 40,000 Federal Bureau of Prisons staffers nationwide, most of whom were deemed “essential” and therefore required to work without pay until the shutdown ends. Bureau staffers say they’re already dealing with low morale after years of cutbacks in their prisons, meaning more inmates with fewer guards and gear they worry is inadequate to protect them.

And now they’re working without knowing when they’ll get paid.

“Everybody's scared. They don't know what the hell's going on because this is different than 2013. We all went through the 2013 shutdown and it was 16 days,” McGlothin said. “There was a different sense in Washington. They wanted to reopen. There's not that sense right now.”

The uncertainty means that some employees are having to forego child support payments, leave healthcare bills unpaid and choosing between putting food on the table or enough gas in their tanks to go to work. And John Kostelnik, a local union president at the federal prison complex in Victorville, Calif., says he’s worried about the mental toll the stress may take on his workers.

“You walk behind these prison walls and deal with the worst of the worst. See some things you never want to see in your entire life,” he said.


“My staff are dealing with a lot of issues, and this is just weighing down on them even further. And that's one of my biggest fears — is that this is going to drive somebody over that over that line and something bad is going to happen.”

Kostelnik said that in the last two years two employees in the Victorville have committed suicide.

Kostelnik and McGlothin said they disagree with Trump's insistence that federal workers support his standoff with Democrats over funding for the border wall. And Edward Canelas, a veteran and union leader at a federal prison in Dublin, Calif., who voted for Trump in 2016 said he was "very insulted" by the president's comments.

"You said ‘I'm going to take care of them veterans and I'm going to take care of law enforcement.’ I haven't seen it. With all due respect to the president of United States, I have not seen it."

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WEST BEND, Wisconsin — Luke Emrich preached his first sermon when he was 9, and then heeded the call of ministry as a teenager. Tonia Emrich was raised by a single mother who devoted both their lives to Jesus Christ. When the two met (at church, of course), got married, and began their own ministry together, it was a match made in heaven.

But when Luke traveled to India to connect with the underground Christian Church in 2010 and found more Western culture than unadulterated Christianity, the trip served as the culmination of years of quiet questioning and doubt about the Trinitarian God and true biblical practices.

VICE News talked to Luke and Tonia about their journey away from Christianity and learned that, at least for one reverend, it’s possible to lead a congregation without believing in God at all.

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Scott Dozier was ready to die. Not only did the Nevada death row inmate give up appealing his 2007 death sentence for the murder of 22-year-old Jeremiah Miller, but Dozier had no reservations about the possibility of becoming the first person to be executed in the United States with the opioid fentanyl.

Dozier’s circumstances made him one of the country’s best-known inhabitants of death row, as more and more pharmaceutical companies refuse to let states use their products in lethal injections and force them to scramble for substitutes, like fentanyl. But this weekend, Dozier apparently decided he was done waiting for Nevada to kill him: Prison officials found him hanging from a bed sheet, tied to an air vent in his solo cell on Saturday. They pronounced him dead at 4:35 p.m.

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This is the December 17, 2018 FULL EPISODE of VICE News Tonight on HBO.

2:10 The city of Newark has a lead crisis on its hands. Last year, it received a state violation because it exceeded federal lead limits for drinking water. Today, as many as 22,000 homes could be affected.

9:13 A federal judge in Texas ruled that part of the ACA was unconstitutional. This time the Republican's State Attorney's General who filed this suit tried a new tactic.

13:13 The goal of this year’s UN Climate conference was to sort how countries will track and report their emissions under the Paris Agreement. And as of this Saturday, they accomplished that with more than 200 countries agreeing to emissions reduction guidelines

15:52 Miami just hosted its 17th annual Art Week. But you might know it better by the name "Art Basel." And the scene here is guaranteed Instagram bait. But this year, Instagrammers weren't just documenting the art. They were making it. Meet the mind behind one of the most popular Instagram accounts in hip hop: Young Thug As Paintings at Art Basel Miami

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REYNOSA, Mexico — The mayors of two sister-cities across the Texas-Mexico border agree that the "physical barrier" President Donald Trump desperately wants will only make the situation worse.

To start, Mexico already has all the wall it needs, according to Maki Ortiz, the mayor of Reynosa, one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico, across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas.

"It's called jobs, education," Ortiz told VICE News in an interview at her office Thursday. "We don't want any Mexicans to go out of the country. That's why in this city we created twenty thousand jobs. That is our wall."

McAllen, Texas, Mayor Jim Darling also doesn't think the wall is necessary.

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