President Donald Trump suggested Tuesday that some of the hundreds of thousands of federal workers currently furloughed due to the shutdown may not receive back pay when the government reopens.
Asked by a reporter at the White House if the administration believes that furloughed workers should receive back pay once the shutdown is over, Trump replied, “I would say it depends on who you’re talking about.” The president blamed Democrats for putting “a lot of people in great risk and jeopardy” and added that “for the most part, we’re going to take care of our people. There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”
Potential legal questions: Trump’s comments follow reports that the White House has drafted a memo stating that furloughed workers are not guaranteed back pay. The memo, reportedly written by the top lawyer at the White House Office of Management and Budget, argues that the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 is “deficient” because it was later amended. The law, which was passed by Congress and signed by Trump during his first term, is generally seen as making back pay automatic.
"Does this law cover all these furloughed employees automatically?” one White House official said to Axios. “The conventional wisdom is: Yes, it does. Our view is: No, it doesn't.”
As Axios’s Marc Caputo notes, the OMB legal analysis contradicts guidance recently released by the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Personnel Management that said furloughed workers should receive back pay automatically. But it appears that OMB — headed by Russell Vought, whom Trump recently celebrated as a government-slashing Grim Reaper — is seeking to ramp up pressure on Democrats, or at least make them angry, by threatening not to pay some government employees.
Plenty of critics: Lawmakers from both parties were critical of the OMB memo on Tuesday. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina told reporters that the threat of non-payment is “bad strategy” and “probably not a good message to send right now to people who are not being paid.” At a press conference, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, “Every single furloughed federal employee is entitled to backpay. Period, full stop. The law is clear. We will make sure that law is followed.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a moderate Democrat targeted by Republicans as a potential ally in their effort to end the shutdown, said Tuesday that the threat of nonpayment isn’t helping to end the shutdown. “It would be a lot easier to resolve the situation if Russ Vought would stop talking,” she said.