As the longest-ever federal government shutdown drags on, Chad Davis-Montgomery and his husband worry about paying the February rent for their Oakland apartment.

“If I’m not back to work in another week, we will have a serious problem on our hands,” said Davis-Montgomery. He’s been furloughed for four weeks from his job as an administrative officer at the Food and Drug Administration in Alameda. His salary is more than half the couple’s income — and, like many people in the pricey Bay Area, their financial cushion is thin.

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But the government could see any outside work as problematic, said William Gould IV, an emeritus professor at Stanford Law School and former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board. “Unless the policies use narrow language about employer-employee relationships, any commercial relationship with an outside entity” may be subject to the conflict-of-interest policies, he said.