Hundreds of thousands of federal workers had been furloughed or working without pay since the government shut down on Oct. 1.
After the White House and Congress finally resolved the record-breaking standoff Wednesday, federal employees are poised to return to work — and should expect to see their back pay hit their bank accounts within days of the government reopening.
The Senate on Monday voted 60-40 on a legislative package that includes some funding bills for next year, along with a continuing resolution to reopen the rest of the government through Jan. 30. The House passed the bill Wednesday evening, and President Trump signed it into law later that night.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) — the largest federal employee union representing more than 820,000 federal and D.C. government workers — is hopeful the back pay for federal workers will be issued promptly.
“Both the law that established the right of back pay and the new CR instruct the agencies to provide back pay as soon as they possibly can, as soon as it’s practicable, rather than require people to wait till their next regularly scheduled pay day,” AFGE Policy Director Jacqueline Simon said in an interview with The Hill.
“You know, that won’t be tomorrow, but it shouldn’t be more than a couple days,” she continued.
Simon noted that, in the past, back pay following government shutdowns came in within “a couple of days.”
A senior administration official told The Hill’s partner network NewsNation that federal workers could start receiving paychecks as early as Saturday, and that the administration aims to pay all federal workers by Wednesday.
A memo, obtained by Semafor, detailed the payment projection schedule from agency to agency, with each processing its payments independently.
Back pay for more than 12,000 employees at the General Services Administration (GSA) and Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is projected to be processed on Saturday, Semafor reported. A senior administration official confirmed the reporting to NewsNation.
GSA and OPM paychecks “will only include base pay,” and further corrections will be “made in the next pay cycle,” Semafor reported, citing the memo.
Employees at the departments of Energy, Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services are projected to receive their paychecks starting Sunday. The Defense Department’s Army and non-Army civilian employees are also projected to receive their first paychecks on Sunday. Those paychecks “will include standard pay as well as payments” for things like overtime and hazard pay, according to the memo.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Tuesday said air traffic controllers, who missed their second paycheck Tuesday, should receive 70 percent of their back pay within a day or two and the rest within a week.
The AFGE does not represent air traffic controllers.
Caleb Quakenbush, associate director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, similarly said he saw no reason for federal employees to expect a delay on their back pay, once the legislation is signed into law and the government reopens.
He noted legislation passed in 2019 mandates that federal workers receive “back pay at the earliest possible date, regardless of when their actual pay date is.”
“So it is really just a matter of how quickly the payroll processors at their respective agencies are able to get the necessary tabulations and disbursements done,” Quakenbush said.
Congress has traditionally voted to retroactively pay federal workers who were furloughed or working unpaid, once a deal is reached to reopen the government.
But during the 2018-19 shutdown, Congress passed the “Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019,” which has been broadly interpreted to mandate back pay for federal employees and public employees in Washington, D.C., who are furloughed or required to work unpaid during a government shutdown.
After the White House raised the possibility last month that some employees might not be paid after the shutdown ended, senators included language in the recent bill to eliminate any possibility of debate over the matter.
Updated Nov. 13 at 12:04 p.m. EST