‘We got the people that we want paid’: FBI, military continue receiving paychecks during shutdown

FBI special agents are still being paid despite the ongoing government shutdown, President Donald Trump and FBI Director Kash Patel said during an Oval Office press conference Wednesday. 

“We got the people that we want paid — paid,” Trump said. “And we want the FBI paid and we want the military paid.”

The Defense Department on Wednesday repurposed, possibly unlawfully, approximately $8 billion in unobligated research and development funding for service member pay. Likewise, the Homeland Security Department on Tuesday said that it would use money from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to ensure members of the Coast Guard don’t miss paychecks this week. 

Neither Trump or Patel addressed where the funding is coming from for agent pay. And the FBI didn’t respond to a request for comment, but an automatic reply noted that all agency employees are considered essential during a shutdown. 

Federal employees, whether or not they’re deemed essential and ordered to continue working, are generally not paid during a shutdown. While they’re owed back pay when funding resumes, the Trump administration has argued that workers who are furloughed due to the lapse aren’t entitled to back pay despite a 2019 law requiring it.  

The FBI Agents Association in a statement thanked Trump for continuing to pay special agents but emphasized that those aren’t the only employees at the agency. 

“Analysts, professional staff and other personnel — who continue to work without pay — play a vital role in confronting threats from terrorism and cyberattacks to violent crime and corruption,” the organization said. “If the shutdown continues, the Bureau will be forced to curtail travel, training, hiring and other vital operations, slowing investigations and weakening coordination with law enforcement partners. Public safety and national security must not be jeopardized.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a question about if any other federal law enforcement employees were getting paid despite the funding lapse. The Homeland Security Department pointed to a Wednesday press release that stressed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are going without pay despite ongoing deportation operations. 

Mathew Silverman, the national president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, wrote in a Wednesday op-ed for Law Enforcement Today that many federal agents have already received a reduced paycheck and are currently slated to not receive any of their salary for the next pay period. 

“I struggle to think of another profession in this country where employees would be required to work indefinitely under these circumstances. But across the federal government, thousands of law enforcement professionals are doing exactly that, not because they can afford to, but because they took an oath and refuse to abandon their mission,” he wrote. “That sense of duty should not be exploited.”

Also during the Wednesday Oval Office press conference, Trump reiterated his threat to terminate federal programs that the GOP is generally opposed to. 

“We're terminating those programs and they're going to be terminated on a permanent basis and it's thousands of people and it's billions of dollars,” he said. 

While the president said that this is a consequence of the shutdown, the administration has been laying off swaths of the civil service since nearly the beginning of his second term. 

Officials laid off around 4,000 federal employees across seven agencies on Oct. 10, however, a federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked that reduction in force as well as any other shutdown layoffs.