On Tuesday, the Trump admin said furloughed feds were not guaranteed back pay. On Wednesday, it sent notices saying they were

The Internal Revenue Service, like many agencies around government, has weathered the shutdown by using existing funds to keep employees on the job. 

By Wednesday morning, however, those funds had run dry and the agency began sending furlough notices to tens of thousands of workers. Effective immediately, they would be sent home and no longer working for as long as the government remains closed. 

The notices contained largely boilerplate language, with one excerpt of note: 

“Although you will be placed in non-pay and non-duty status during the furlough, the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 requires employees of the federal government who are furloughed or required to work during a lapse in appropriations to be compensated for the period of the lapse,” the messages read, according to multiple copies obtained by Government Executive. “The employees must be compensated on the earliest date possible after the lapse ends, regardless of scheduled pay dates.” 

That language was noteworthy because the Office of Management and Budget has deleted from its guidance any reference to the 2019 law or back pay for furloughed federal workers, as Government Executive first reported. After Axios on Tuesday revealed that the Trump administration would take a novel interpretation of the back pay law and argue it applied only to the 2019 shutdown, OMB released to media outlets new legal guidance making that argument.

The 2019 measure—which Trump signed into law during the record-setting 35-day shutdown that ended that year—explicitly stated that it applied to any employee furloughed during “any lapse in appropriations that begins on or after December 22, 2018.”

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress rejected the Trump administration's newly minted legal argument, saying the matter was settled and the workers were guaranteed retroactive pay. Legal experts said the plain reading of the law and its legislative history made clear Congress intended to ensure back pay for those furloughed in all future shutdowns, and the Trump administration’s own guidance on the law in 2019 stated it applied in perpetuity. 

IRS employees were pleased to see the back pay guarantee in their notices, which was also included in the messages sent to workers at other agencies last week. The agency was set to furlough around 35,000 employees, according to a Bloomberg report, or nearly half of its employees.

“It says we get paid, in writing!” one IRS employee who was furloughed Wednesday said. “This will be extremely helpful to the union when Trump tries to not pay us.”

Erich Wagner contributed to this report.