U.S. President Donald Trump speaks as he and Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney (not pictured) meet in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., Oct. 7, 2025.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
President Donald Trump suggested Tuesday that some federal workers who have been furloughed during the government shutdown will not receive back pay after they return to work.
The remark came hours after the circulation of a draft White House memo arguing that federal employees placed on unpaid leave are not guaranteed back pay.
The memo, first reported by Axios and confirmed to NBC News by the White House, appears to clash with the Trump administration’s own recent guidance. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management, in a shutdown guidance sheet issued last month, stated definitively that furloughed workers would be paid retroactively once the funding lapse ends.
A federal law, which Trump signed after the last government shutdown in 2019, additionally says that furloughed U.S. government employees “shall be paid for the period of the lapse in appropriations.”
A White House official told Axios that the administration’s view is that that law does not automatically cover furloughed employees’ back pay, and that Congress must specifically appropriate those funds.
Trump, when asked at the White House on Tuesday afternoon about back pay for those workers, said, “I would say it depends on who we’re talking about.”
The Democrats — whom Trump and Republicans blame for the shutdown that is now on Day 7 — “have put a lot of people in great risk and jeopardy,” the president said in the Oval Office alongside Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
“But it really depends on who you’re talking about,” he said. “For the most part, we’re going to take care of our people.”
Trump added, “There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”
When asked why he said some workers should not get their back pay, he said, “Ask the Democrats that question.”
The administration’s signaling about workers’ back pay has been widely viewed as an attempt to ratchet up pressure on Senate Democrats to vote for Republicans’ proposal for a stopgap bill that will resume government funding at current levels until late November.
The administration has previously warned that the shutdown will soon lead to thousands of federal workers being permanently laid off, rather than just furloughed, as has been the case in past funding lapses.
Asked Tuesday how many permanent jobs are on the chopping block, Trump said he will be able to say “in four or five days, if this keeps going on.”
“It’ll be substantial, and a lot of those jobs will never come back,” he added. “But you’re going to have a lot closer to a balanced budget, actually.”
Democrats have brushed off those threats, arguing that the administration has already been trying to slash the size of the federal workforce since Trump took office again in January.
They want any short-term resolution to include an extension of enhanced premium tax credits under the Affordable Care Act, which are set to expire at year’s end. Republicans, who hold a 53-seat majority in the Senate, need at least seven more votes to overcome the chamber’s filibuster.
The administration’s scrutiny about back pay prompted a fiery response from the American Federation of Government Employees, a major federal workers’ union.
“The frivolous argument that federal employees are not guaranteed backpay under the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act is an obvious misinterpretation of the law,” AFGE President Everett Kelley said in a statement.
“It is also inconsistent with the Trump administration’s own guidance from mere days ago, which clearly and correctly states that furloughed employees will receive retroactive pay for the time they were out of work as quickly as possible once the shutdown is over,” he said.
“As we’ve said before, the livelihoods of the patriotic Americans serving their country in the federal government are not bargaining chips in a political game,” Kelley said. “It’s long past time for these attacks on federal employees to stop and for Congress to come together, resolve their differences, and end this shutdown.”