WASHINGTON — Along Pennsylvania Avenue, not far from the Trump International Hotel and in between the Capitol and the White House, Carrie Wilder, a single mother and 11-year government employee, was on the verge of tears as she waited for free food.

“I’ve never felt the pervasive sense of hopelessness that I feel now,” said Ms. Wilder, who is doing clerical work without pay for the Justice Department during the government shutdown. She recently began asking her mother, 77, for money after she depleted savings she had accumulated since the last government shutdown in 2013.

“I am watching the news every 10 minutes praying that something happens, because we cannot take any more,” said Ms. Wilder, one of many affected earning an annual salary of around $50,000.

She was among the federal workers who lined up on Wednesday at a kitchen opened by José Andrés, the Spanish Michelin-starred chef, disaster relief organizer and occasional antagonist of the Trump family. Operated by Mr. Andrés’s nonprofit organization, World Central Kitchen, the relief site is equipped to feed thousands of government workers and their families, many of whom are using food pantries for the first time as their savings accounts dwindle.

The government shutdown has hit especially hard in Washington, the heart of the federal bureaucracy, where skyrocketing living costs have strained lower-income public employees. Over a quarter-million federal employees live in the capital region. As Mr. Andrés’s site opened Wednesday, federal workers lined up around the building with varying intensities of desperation and despondence.

The typical federal worker touched by the shutdown has missed $5,000 in pay so far. (President Trump signed a bill on Wednesday committing back pay to those who have not been paid during the shutdown.)

LaKisha Stepney, an administrative assistant at the Justice Department, which has over 100,000 employees affected by the shutdown, said she was worried that this was the beginning of more cash-short compromises she would need to make.

“It hasn’t gotten to that point yet, but I’m sure if they don’t come to a resolution in the next week or two, I’ll have to” go to food pantries, she said.

Inside, chefs and volunteers functioned as hurried line cooks and cashiers doling out brown bags of meals for then and later: roasted fennel and tomato soup, quinoa bowls with braised kale and fried brussels sprouts and toasted sandwiches with ham, a fried egg and roasted garlic aioli, all testaments to Mr. Andrés’s insistence on upscale cuisine. The meals were paid for by donations from foundations and individual donors.

By midafternoon they had served 4,000 meals, about twice what was anticipated, according to Nate Mook, World Central Kitchen’s executive director. Mr. Mook brought in professional chefs who served meals to victims of Hurricane Florence in North Carolina and the recent forest fires in California.

“Is this a political emergency? No. It’s a humanitarian emergency,” Mr. Andrés said in an interview Tuesday as he prepared to open the kitchen.

Jennifer Dews, a technician at the Agriculture Department who picked up food at the relief site, said she had stopped paying parts of her bills, and had begun using pantries at churches in Washington for groceries, hoping to keep her children well fed.

“The misconception is that we don’t do anything,” she said of government workers like her. “Now they can see the impact of it.”

Mr. Andrés’s is just one of a number of programs that have sprung up around Washington to help.

On Tuesday evening, Whole Foods grocery stores in the area served free spaghetti dinners to federal workers. Area restaurants have for weeks offered deals to government employees who display IDs.

The Capital Area Food Bank, which serves food to 450 local nonprofit partners, has seen such an uptick in calls since the shutdown began that an all-staff email was sent recently asking for more help calling people back.

Radha Muthiah, the food bank’s president, said the organization had to reassess its targets, moving from those around the poverty line on food stamps to those making upward of $60,000 a year.

“What was more interesting than the number were the types of calls: individuals who had never had to request food,” she said of those contacting the food bank. “Many had donated, but had never expected to be on the receiving end.”

On Saturday, the organization set up five pop-up centers with 30,000 pounds of fresh produce. Some locations ran out of food in an hour, and twice as many government workers showed up than were expected.

Ms. Muthiah said she helped serve employees from the Environmental Protection Agency, the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and National Institutes of Health. She met a woman suddenly training to become a substitute teacher. Many of them, she said, were so worried about proving they were in need that they brought furlough letters and pay stubs that read zero.

“What this experience is showing them is that so many of us live paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “Any time of emergency — whether a medical emergency or something else — how quickly one can become vulnerable.”

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