And so he is:
Furloughed federal workers aren’t guaranteed compensation for their forced time off during the government shutdown, according to a draft White House memo described to Axios by three sources.
If the White House acts on that legal analysis, it would dramatically escalate President Trump‘s pressure on Senate Democrats to end the week-old shutdown by denying back pay to as many as 750,000 federal workers after the shutdown.
Trump wants the Democrats to back a continuing resolution to fund the government with no strings about healthcare subsidies attached.
- “This would not have happened if Democrats voted for the clean CR,” a senior administration official said.
How can they do this? Well:
At issue is the ”Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019″ that Trump signed during the last government shutdown, which lasted a record 35 days.
- Called GEFTA, the law has been widely interpreted as ensuring that furloughed workers automatically would be compensated after future shutdowns.
- But the new White House memo from the Office of Management and Budget argues that GEFTA has been misconstrued or, in the words of one source, is “deficient” because it was amended nine days later, on Jan. 25, 2019.
- “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 said.
The new OMB analysis is a major departure from the administration’s own guidance issued by the Council of Economic Advisers this month and the Office of Personnel Management last month. Both said furloughed workers should get automatic back pay after the shutdown.
- “OMB is in charge,” a senior White House official said.
Yeah, we know.
The White House’s stance revolves around the law’s amended version, which added a phrase saying furloughed workers shall be compensated “subject to the enactment of appropriations Acts ending the lapse.” That’s a technical phrase for shutdown.
- To the White House, that means money for those workers needs to be specifically appropriated by Congress. The joint resolution containing that amendment to the law specified that the U.S. government would pay “obligations incurred” during that 2019 shutdown.
- “If it [GEFTA] was self-executing” in future shutdowns, “why did Congress do that? It’s precedent,” the White House official said, calling any other interpretation “ridiculous.”
[…]
The White House analysis of the law reflects the administration’s multipronged effort to make the shutdown unbearable for Democrats.
- Federal workers overwhelmingly made campaign contributions to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris last year, Trump Republicans note.
- The furlough of hundreds of thousands of workers each day follows the administration’s widespread, DOGE-led cuts to the federal workforce earlier this year…
That’s what Trump was talking about this morning when he said:
So Congress can appropriate the money to pay them. But then Vought says the president can allocate money any way he wants. Nice little Catch-22 there.