Paychecks to federal workers reportedly will begin going out Saturday following the end to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.
According to a memo reviewed by Semafor, the Trump administration has laid out an agency-by-agency plan to issue back pay to hundreds of thousands of employees who went without checks during the 43-day funding lapse.
The document says pay will start going out this weekend, with the goal of completing the first round of payments by Nov. 19 as agencies work through their own payroll systems.
Roughly 12,400 workers at the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management are first in line, with back pay scheduled to be processed Saturday.
Those checks will include base pay only, with adjustments handled in the next pay cycle.
On Sunday, employees at the Departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, and Veterans Affairs, along with Army and other civilian War Department workers, are slated to receive pay that includes overtime and hazard pay, the memo says.
By Monday, workers at Education, State, Interior, Transportation, the EPA, NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Social Security Administration are expected to follow, covering more than 150,000 additional employees.
For many agencies, this round of back pay will cover missed wages from Oct. 1 through Nov. 1, with the remaining days of the shutdown paid on later checks because of differing payroll vendors and schedules.
A second group of departments — including Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, HUD, Justice, Labor, Treasury, and the Small Business Administration — is projected to have full-shutdown back pay processed by Nov. 19.
The Hill confirmed that federal workers will begin seeing money as soon as Saturday, noting that the White House has urged agencies to move “expeditiously and accurately,” so employees aren’t left waiting any longer than necessary.
CBS News pointed out that workers are guaranteed retroactive pay under the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019, which requires agencies to issue back wages as soon as possible once funding is restored.
President Donald Trump signed the stopgap bill to reopen the government Wednesday night, funding most operations through Jan. 30 and rolling back planned layoffs.
While Democrats tried to leverage the shutdown to force an expansion of Obamacare subsidies, Republicans held firm, keeping the fight over new entitlements separate from basic government funding.
Newsmax Wires contributed to this report.
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