President Donald Trump hosts a Rose Garden Club dinner, Wednesday, September 24, 2025, in the newly renovated White House Rose Garden. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)
Despite President Donald Trump assuring federal workers (including thousands of active duty service members affected by the government shutdown) that they would be receiving back pay, Axios reports the White House believes furloughed federal workers arenot entitled to "guaranteed compensation."
According to a draft of a White House memo obtained by Axios, this denial of back pay "would dramatically escalate 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."
Republicans blame Democrats who refuse 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 told Axios.
On Sunday, ,Trump told sailors at the Naval Station Norfolk that "I want you to know that despite the current Democrat-induced shutdown, we will get our service members every last penny. It's all coming, it's coming," according to Norfolk news station 13 News Now.
But this new memo obtained by Axios challenges the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act (GEFTA) of 2019 that Trump signed during the last government shutdown, which lasted a record 35 days, ensuring that furloughed workers would automatically be compensated after future shutdowns.
The memo, Axios says, "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."
That amendment 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," Axios says.
"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.
Legal experts representing federal workers disagree with the White House's interpretation.
"There is no legal authority to support that interpretation of the statute," said Nekeisha Campbell, labor attorney with Alan Lescht & Associates.
"When the language of a statute is plain, courts must apply it except in the rare circumstance when there is a clearly expressed legislative intent to the contrary, or when a literal application would frustrate the statute's purpose or lead to an absurd result," she said.
Sam Berger, senior fellow at the Center for Policy and Budget Priorities, agreed, saying "The law here is quite clear. The caveat is, if you follow the law," calling the amended language "a simple recognition of the appropriations process, not a restriction on compensating furloughed workers."
"Moral hazards on top of moral hazards. Their read of the law is that the back pay needs to be 'specifically appropriated by Congress.' But you can just not appropriate that money — or appropriate it and impound it," wrote Semafor's politics reporter David Weigel on X.