The guarantee of back pay for furloughed federal employees is now in limbo, as the White House weighs a different interpretation of the 2019 law that ensures federal employees get compensated following a government shutdown.
A new draft legal opinion from the Office of Management and Budget, as first reported by Axios, argues that whatever funding legislation Congress ultimately passes to end the current shutdown must explicitly include appropriations to provide back pay for furloughed federal employees. And if it’s not expressly written in the spending legislation, the OMB memo argues that furloughed workers cannot receive any retroactive compensation.
A copy of the OMB document, which a senior White House official shared with Federal News Network, appears to contradict OMB’s previous interpretation of the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act, or GEFTA, which President Donald Trump signed into law in 2019 during the last government shutdown. Both OMB and the Office of Personnel Management previously affirmed that under GEFTA, excepted and furloughed employees would be given back pay as soon as possible, once any current or future shutdown ends.
In technical terms, GEFTA amended the Antideficiency Act to state that both furloughed and excepted employees “shall be paid” for the length of the shutdown, “at the earliest date possible” after the shutdown ends.
But the new draft legal opinion at OMB points to one specific phrase in the 2019 law, which states that the...
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