Dueling plans to pay feds on-time fail in Senate, though a bipartisan path forward appears

Senate Democrats and Republicans each defeated the other party’s plan to pay at least some federal employees on time amid the ongoing government shutdown, though both sides appeared to open the door to bipartisan negotiations on the issue.

The Senate voted 54-45 on a motion to begin floor consideration of legislation unveiled earlier this week by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., that would immediately pay all “excepted” employees who are forced to work during the appropriations lapse, as defined by the Office of Personnel Management. The measure needed 60 votes to advance; Sens. John Fetterman, D-Pa., Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both D-Ga., voted in favor of the motion.

Prior to the vote, Democrats advanced their own proposals, both introduced Thursday morning, to pay feds on time. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., advanced a plan to pay all federal workers, regardless of their furlough or excepted status, military servicemembers and contractors, as well as bar the White House from pursuing reductions in force during the shutdown. And Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., proposed a narrower measure that would simply pay all federal workers and contractors for what they would have earned between Oct. 1 and the bill’s enactment, had the government been open.

All three plans also pay military service members on time, though the Trump administration has taken that step unilaterally and under murky legal authority.

Van Hollen said that Democrats object to two elements of Johnson’s plan: that it only pays employees deemed excepted by OPM, rather than all federal workers and contractors, on time; and that it does not address the administration’s effort to lay off feds during the shutdown, implementation of which has been at least partially blocked by a federal judge in California.

“Our proposal does not discriminate among federal employees,” Van Hollen said. “Here’s the really dangerous part of Sen. Johnson’s proposal: we have a President Trump, along with Russ Vought–his cockpit at [the Office of Management and Budget]–who has said he wants to ‘inflict trauma’ on the federal workforce. If you allow them to decide who they’ll keep on the job in the federal government and who they’re going to pay, you’re also giving them a blank check as to who they’re going to send home and who they’ll punish by not paying. That’s what they’ve already been doing.”

Johnson objected to both Van Hollen and Peters’ unanimous consent requests to take up their bills, but suggested he would be open to a compromise.

“I haven’t done a word-count comparison yet, but I would guess that probably 95% of our bills say the same thing, and that’s a good thing,” Johnson said. “Now the senator from Maryland’s bill includes furloughed employees. The fact of the matter is that when all is said and done, when we end this and fund the government through appropriations, because of the 2019 Government Employees Fair Treatment Act, they’ll get paid anyway. My bill is obviously targeted toward those forced to work, but I’m not opposed to paying furloughed workers as well. That’s something we can talk about.”

But Johnson suggested he was not as willing to budge on adding language blocking the administration from issuing RIFs during the appropriations lapse. Still, Van Hollen expressed a willingness to have a meeting between the lawmakers and staff to find common ground.

“I’d be happy to sit down to see if we can put a proposal together based on the principle that no federal worker should bear the burden or the pain of a decision that they had nothing to do with, as well as many of these contractors,” he said.

Johnson also suggested he and his staff would meet with Van Hollen and Peters in hopes of finding a mutually acceptable solution. 

Many federal employees are set to miss their entire paychecks for the first time on Friday, a fact White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt lamented on Thursday. She noted increased absenteeism among air traffic controllers has already led to delays and ground stops around the country and suggested the issue will only continue to worsen. Some controllers are taking side jobs, she said, and their absences will be felt particularly acutely as Thanksgiving approaches.  

“If the Democrats continue to keep the government closed, we fear there will be significant flight delays, disruptions and cancellations in major airports across the country this holiday season,” Leavitt said. “If Democrats continue to shut down the government, they will also be shutting down American air travel.” 

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has taken a novel position that existing federal law does not require agencies to provide back pay to furloughed workers, in contravention of the statute Congress passed and President Trump signed into law in 2019. On the Senate floor on Thursday, Johnson repeatedly noted that the law does, in fact, require furloughed workers to receive back pay.

Leavitt did not address the various bills to pay federal workers immediately, but did endorse carving out the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to ensure beneficiaries do not miss out on payments in the coming days. 

“But the bill that will get everyone paid and put everyone back to work,” she said, “is the clean continuing resolution.”