President Donald Trump plans to deny federal employees billions of dollars in back pay when the government finally reopens after the shutdown, according to U.S. media reporting.
The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019, which Trump signed during the last government shutdown, is widely understood to automatically pay furloughed workers for their forced time off during a government shutdown.
But a new White House memo argues that, thanks to a single phrase, the law doesn’t automatically cover furloughed employees, Axios reported.
If that’s the case, the roughly 750,000 furloughed employees could lose out on billions of dollars’ worth of pay.
Congressional Budget Office Director Phillip Swagel estimated, in a letter to lawmakers, that the furloughed employees’ compensation cost is roughly $400 million per day, meaning that, after just a few days, the amount has ballooned into billions.
The law in question says that furloughed workers shall be compensated “subject to the enactment of appropriations Acts ending the lapse,” with “lapse” being a technical word for a shutdown.
Until now, that was widely understood to mean that as long as Congress follows the law and passes an appropriations bill to end the shutdown, workers will be compensated later.
According to the White House, though, the back pay is not “self-executing” and must be specifically appropriated by Congress, according to Axios.
“Does this law cover all these furloughed employees automatically? The conventional wisdom is: Yes, it does. Our view is: No, it doesn’t,” a senior White House official told the publication.
Legal experts, however, disagreed, telling Axios the law was “quite clear” and that the phrase in question was a recognition of the appropriations process, not a restriction on compensating furloughed workers.
Before he entered office, Trump had a long history of not paying his workers. A 2016 investigation by USA Today found that he had been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits for allegedly failing to pay contractors, hospitality staff, real estate brokers, and even his own lawyers.
Between 2005 and 2016, his companies were also cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
Regardless of how the federal employees law is ultimately interpreted, though, the threat to withhold federal employees’ back pay is part of a broader strategy to make the shutdown as painful as possible for Democrats, and to force them to agree to a Republican spending bill, according to Axios.
Both Trump and his budget director, Russ Vought, have warned that Republicans plan to try to fire furloughed workers permanently.
Vought also announced the administration is withholding more than $20 billion worth of funding that was already approved for infrastructure projects in Democratic cities and states.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
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